Hoover Too Will Be on Trial

No episode in the violent history of Southern segregationist resistance to the civil rights movement more outraged the national conscience than the Sunday morning bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963, an atrocity that left four African American girls dead and a score of other people injured. The FBI assigned several hundred investigators to the case, and four men with ties to the Ku Klux Klan were quickly identified as prime suspects. But years passed with no prosecutions. In 1968 J. Edgar Hoover, the authoritarian director of the FBI whose own passionate dislike of the civil rights movement raises the deepest doubts about his motives, ordered the investigation shut down. Not until 1977, five years after Hoover’s death, was one suspect, Robert Edward Chambliss, finally charged and convicted. He died in prison in 1985.

In Birmingham this week two former Klan members, long believed implicated in the bombing, were charged in state court with four counts of intentional murder and four counts of murder with universal malice. Thomas Blanton Jr., 62, and Bobby Frank Cherry, 69, are being held without bail. Prosecutors are saying little about what new evidence, if any, led to their indictments. It is known that family members, some of them estranged, were called to testify before the grand jury. It’s also known that FBI investigators were confident in the 1960s that they had enough evidence to win convictions, before Hoover stepped in and shelved the case.

There is no statute of limitation on murder, and there is no predicting when troubled consciences might finally compel long-silent witnesses to speak up. Recent years have seen other convictions in racial killings from decades ago, though in some of the era’s most notorious crimes--the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955, the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi in 1964--the state has never brought murder charges.

Everyone hopes that justice may at last be near in the Birmingham bombing case. But justice delayed for nearly 40 years, half a lifetime during which the killers of four little girls walked free, is partial justice only. The trial will reveal the evidence that led to the charges against Blanton and Cherry. It will not be complete if it fails to expose as well the reasons why J. Edgar Hoover intervened to prevent timely justice from being done when it mattered most.