Justice in Birmingham, Finally

“It is never too late for justice.”

Those are the words of Doug Jones, the U.S. attorney who prosecuted--and on Tuesday successfully convicted--Thomas E. Blanton Jr. on four counts of first-degree murder for his role in the Sept. 15, 1963, bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. The blast killed four black girls--Denise McNair, 11, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, all 14--and shocked the world on a Sunday morning barely two weeks after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington.

King delivered the eulogy for the girls at their funeral. He said, “These children--unoffending, innocent and beautiful--were the victims of one of the most vicious, heinous crimes ever perpetuated against humanity. Yet they died nobly.”

They died in a hometown nicknamed “Bombingham” because of the violence during the civil rights struggle. They were killed in a church that had been a center of a children’s crusade that pitted young, nonviolent marchers against police officers fielding vicious K-9 dogs and blasting powerful fire hoses.

Blanton was a suspect in the bombing. He escaped prosecution after FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover closed the case. The FBI secretly reopened the case in 1993. The former member of the Klu Klux Klan is the second man to be convicted on charges stemming from the church bombing--Robert Chambliss was convicted in 1977. Blanton, now 62 and sentenced to four life sentences, is expected to die in prison.

Justice has not been denied.