Grand Jury Told of ’63 Church Bombing

Federal grand jurors in Birmingham, Ala., are hearing testimony in the reopened case of a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls. The Rev. John Cross, who was pastor of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church at the time of the explosion, said after his testimony that he had no trouble recalling the dynamite blast. In 1977, Ku Klux Klansman Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder in the explosion. He died in prison, but investigators long ago publicly identified three other men as suspects. They are Herman Cash, who died in 1994; Tommy Blanton of Birmingham; and Bobby Frank Cherry of Mabank, Texas.