‘63 Bombing Suspect Said to Brag

When it came to the church bombing, Bobby Frank Cherry was a braggart, prosecutors said, boasting at family reunions, telling neighbors, even once sharing the story with a stranger laying carpet.

“Over the years, Bobby Cherry has worn this crime on his chest like a badge of honor, like a Klan medal,” said prosecutor Robert Posey. “He said his only regret was that more people didn’t die.”

With that, the prosecution opened the long-awaited trial Tuesday of the last remaining suspect of the deadliest crime of the civil rights era, the dynamiting of a Birmingham church on Sept. 15, 1963, that killed four black girls.

On day one, there was testimony about Klan robes and schoolhouse beatings; video footage of seething mobs wearing tight, white T-shirts rolled up at the sleeves; and old civil rights leaders hobbling up to the witness stand to hunch over the microphone and talk about the battle for equality.

An ex-Marine trained in explosives, Cherry was 33 at the time of the bombing and a member of the Eastview Klavern 13, an especially violent cell of Birmingham’s Ku Klux Klan.

On Tuesday, prosecutors played a newsreel clip from 1957 that showed Cherry taking a swing at a black minister.

Cherry, now 71, swiveled in his chair to watch. He looked bored.

“Bobby’s just an old guy who’s completely innocent and wants this to be over,” his lawyer, Mickey Johnson, said earlier. Cherry faces four counts of first-degree murder.

The prosecution focused on the hatred of the times, with opening statements heavy on history.

Posey reminded jurors--a 16-member panel including four blacks--that this was the Alabama of George C. Wallace, the governor infamous for vowing: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”

And it was the Birmingham of Bull Connor, the police chief who unleashed dogs and fire hoses on marching kids.

As Posey spoke, occasionally using visual aids, there were tears, gasps and long silences. At one moment, an elderly white female juror stared at the video screen, transfixed by a picture of Carole Robertson, 14, wearing a white dress, a single rose in her hands.

She was among the four killed, some so badly burned in the bombing they had to be identified by their shoes.

“It was just an awful sound, like something shaking the world all over,” testified Alpha Robertson, Carole’s 83-year-old mother.

FBI agents quickly zeroed in on four suspects, all known Klansmen--Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas E. Blanton Jr. and Cherry. But the bureau didn’t file charges. A white jury would never convict them, then-director J. Edgar Hoover said.

But, in 1977, an Alabama prosecutor went after Chambliss, known as “Dynamite Bob,” convicting him and sending him to prison, where he died eight years later. The key evidence: family members’ recollections of Chambliss discussing the bombing.

Cash died in 1984 without being charged. He was seen with the three others near the church the night before the bombing.

Last spring, Blanton was put on trial. Federal prosecutors, the same ones trying Cherry, handled the case. It took the jury 2 1/2 hours to find Blanton, 63, guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The Cherry case is expected to be more difficult.

The defense has painted the evidence as “mostly hearsay.” There probably won’t be any evidence as damaging as the old audio tapes on which Blanton was heard saying: “I like to go shooting, I like to fishing, I like to go bombing.”

Also, Cherry is older and concerns about his mental competency nearly derailed the trial.

One of the choicest bits of testimony Tuesday was from a boyhood friend of the Cherrys who said he passed through their house a few days before the bombing, saw Cherry and three men sitting at the kitchen table and heard the words “bomb” and “16th Street.” But he didn’t know who said them.

Prosecutors said they will put on members of Cherry’s family and a man who was laying carpet with Cherry in a Dallas apartment in 1982 (Cherry has lived in Texas for more than 30 years) who heard him own up to the bombing.

The defense has said it will attack witnesses’ credibility. In his statement, Johnson dismissed the case as a “blank fingerprint” and reminded jurors there is no eyewitnesses or forensic evidence. “This has never been a true investigation,” Johnson said, “but a target.”

Johnson said he would like Cherry to take the stand, “to tell his story,” but he’s not sure whether he’s lucid enough.

Among those sitting in the front row are parents of the four girls, often holding hands.

“Yes, honey, it’s hard to be here,” Alpha Robertson said as she closed her eyes and her mind seemed to spin back to that dreadful moment. “But you can’t just go on. If you keep things like this dangling, they haunt you. Forever.”