2 Charged in 1963 Church Bomb Deaths

Decades after they were named as suspects, two former Ku Klux Klansmen have been charged with murder in the infamous 1963 bombing of a black Birmingham, Ala., church, one of the most hideous crimes of the civil rights era.

Nearly 37 years have passed since a dynamite bomb rocked the landmark 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls in a basement lounge. Over time, probes have been opened and dropped then reopened, one man was arrested and convicted, but well-known suspects remained at large.

Now, an Alabama grand jury has indicted 62-year-old Thomas Blanton Jr. of Birmingham and 69-year-old Bobby Frank Cherry of Mabank, Texas. Both men surrendered early Wednesday at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department in Birmingham. They were charged with eight counts of murder--two counts for each victim--and held without bond.

The two men are thought to be the last living suspects in the bombing, a seminal event in the nation’s bloody struggle for equality and one in a series of racially motivated killings recently revisited. “This bombing was the watershed moment of the civil rights movement,” said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, praising the arrests. “In almost every way, it was the moment the conscience of white America-- which had been asleep a very long time--awoke.”

Jefferson County Dist. Atty. David Barber wouldn’t say what new evidence led to the indictments that were so long in the making. A federal grand jury has been hearing evidence since U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno reopened the case in 1997. Barber also wouldn’t say why, after a federal grand jury heard the evidence, it was a state grand jury that handed up the indictments. (The state grand jury heard evidence Monday and Tuesday, before indicting the men Tuesday afternoon.)

Explaining, Barber said, would require disclosing key pieces of evidence.

David Luker, a Birmingham lawyer representing Blanton, said his client will plead innocent. “Absolutely,” Luker said. “He’s maintained his innocence for 37 years.”

It wasn’t immediately clear who would represent Cherry.

Newspaper accounts of the grand jury proceedings have shown a case gradually building, while cracks formed in the alibis of the men. “You need one good alibi,” said Frank Sikora, a retired Birmingham newspaper reporter and author of a book about the bombing, “Until Justice Rolls Down.” “And [Blanton] had five. He kept changing them.”

Shortly after the bombing, Blanton was identified by at least one eyewitness. Also, a car resembling his 1957 Chevrolet, with a whip antenna sporting a Confederate flag, was spotted near the crime scene, said Sikora, who studied FBI files on both men.

Over the years, according to Sikora’s book, Blanton has been questioned frequently by officials, and he has frequently contradicted himself within the same interview. During one interview with an FBI agent, Sikora said, Blanton reached for a knife.

The investigation seemed to gain momentum last summer when Cherry’s granddaughter told the federal grand jury that she’d heard him boasting about killing black people at a church. Interviewed by the Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Miss., at the time, Cherry angrily denied his granddaughter’s testimony. “There ain’t nobody alive or dead who can say I had anything to do with it,” he told the newspaper. “I was home watching wrestling that night.”

Though Wednesday’s arrests appeared to nudge the case toward resolution, Barber wouldn’t rule out the chance that more suspects will be discovered--or more arrests made. “It’s an ongoing investigation. It certainly doesn’t stop here.”

Blanton and Cherry join a group of elderly men who have recently found themselves in jail for celebrated civil rights murders. In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of the June 12, 1963, murder of Medgar Evers, the first field secretary for the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1998, Sam Bowers, former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was convicted of the 1966 murder of Vernon Dahmer, an NAACP official. And in November, Charles E. Caston, James Caston and Hal Crimm were each sentenced to 20 years in prison for the murder of sharecropper Rainey Pool in 1970.

But the Birmingham church bombing was different.

It happened Sept. 15, 1963, just before 10:30 a.m. The four girls were preparing for Youth Day services, slipping into their satin choir robes, when the bomb went off. In a flash, Denise McNair, 11, Addie Mae Collins, 14, Carole Robertson, 14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14, became “modern heroines of a holy crusade,” according to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke at their wrenching funeral roughly two weeks after making his historic “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington.

The first investigations into the bombing led nowhere, despite the army of 200 agents sent by the FBI to Birmingham. “The fact is, this case could have been brought to trial, and very probably successfully tried, 35 or 36 years ago,” Potok said. “But it was not, and the reason it was not was J. Edgar Hoover.”

Within months, agents in the field felt they had the case cracked. “They had identified four Klansmen involved, the very same four named today,” Potok said.

Hoover, however, who despised King, speculated that blacks in Birmingham had bombed their own church to draw sympathy to their cause, Potok said.

The FBI closed the investigation in 1968. The families of the four girls began to move away. Some died.

Shortly after taking office in 1970, Alabama’s attorney general, William Baxley, reopened the case in February 1971. Baxley was known to have carried pictures of the four girls in his wallet for years. Baxley’s investigation led to the indictment, conviction and imprisonment of Robert Edward Chambliss, a longtime Klansman, who died behind bars in 1985.

(The fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died before he could be charged.)

After Chambliss’ conviction, the case faded from public view again until Reno’s dramatic and cryptic announcement that the Justice Department had “received new information.”

“After all this time, you wondered if anything was going to happen,” Sikora said. “Their names have been out there floating all these years.”

In the early 1960s, black residents of Birmingham lived in terror. So many explosions devastated the city that it was dubbed “Bombingham.” But the desecration of the 16th Street Baptist Church finally forced many moderate whites in the South to reexamine their stand on civil rights. “One effect of the bombing is indisputable,” Sikora wrote. “The killing of the four girls seemed to jolt Southern juries to punish white extremists for their crimes.”

Potok goes further.

“It changed the way the North viewed what was going on in the South entirely,” he said. “And I think obviously it also provided the political capital to make passage of the Voting Rights Act and most of the important civil rights legislation possible.”