Ex-Klansman Convicted of 1963 Church Bombing

The new South came to terms with an ugly chapter from its past Wednesday when former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry was found guilty of first-degree murder for bombing a Baptist church and killing four black girls 39 years ago. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The attack--and the fact that Cherry as a chief suspect had not been brought to trial all those years--became a dark and unwanted symbol of this once-segregated city ruled by George C. Wallace and Bull Connor. Many people, black and white, wept quietly in the crowded courtroom when the verdict was read.

Cherry, 71, an ex-Marine trained in demolition, stood with his hands in the pockets of his gray suit when the jury of nine whites and three blacks filed back in Circuit Judge James Garrett’s chambers after six hours of deliberation. To each of the four counts, the foreman said, “We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of first-degree murder.”

Cherry showed not a flicker of emotion. Asked whether he had anything to say, Cherry replied: “Yes, your honor. This whole bunch [of witnesses] lied all the way through this thing. I told the truth. I don’t know why I’m going to jail for nothing.”

He held out his hands, a bailiff handcuffed them and Cherry, who had been free on bail, was led into the adjoining jail, ending one of the last major trials from the 1960s civil rights era.

Although a prime suspect from day one, Cherry seemed destined to remain so until investigators reopened the case in 1995, after five of Cherry’s estranged relatives and former friends told of hearing him brag about the bombing. His granddaughter said he had boasted of “blowing up a bunch of niggers back in Birmingham.” Cherry was indicted in 2000, but his trial was delayed because of questions about his mental competence.

On the steps of the Jefferson County courthouse Wednesday, two middle-aged black men hugged. “Hey, soldier,” said the first, using the term that veterans of the civil rights marches still use for each other, “after so many years....” And the second finished the sentence for him: “Yes, after so many years, justice.”

Next to them, Eunice Davis, the sister of one victim, said, “I still have flashbacks.” Her sister, Cynthia Wesley, was 14 years old when she was killed in the Sunday morning attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963.

“Cynthia is not in my life and that’s what hurts,” Davis said. “There will never be closure on this for me, but I trusted the jury to do justice. It wouldn’t have mattered if they were black or white.”

For Birmingham, a city still haunted by its apartheid past, the trial brought reflection and reevaluation in many quarters, and an eerie echo of bygone days as eight blacks clapped and sang spirituals in front of the courthouse: “Turn me ‘round. Turn me ‘round. Ain’t going to let Bull Connor turn me ‘round.” This time, though, the police officers around them were both black and white.

“Certainly Birmingham is a different city than it was in the ‘50s and ‘60s,” said Marvin Whiting, former archivist of the Birmingham Public Library. “But, oh gosh, we need to do so much more. We need, both blacks and whites, to find the capacity to live together without rancor and the negative elements that can be so tragic for society.

“If we don’t deal with our wounds, I don’t know what we will do. Maybe this trial will help the healing process. I’ve never lost hope that we can latch onto the lessons of history and go beyond our past, but sometimes hope unfulfilled leaves a bad taste in your mouth, yet you’re afraid to let go of it.”

Leaving the courtroom where she’d been one of 150 spectators, Rozina Collins, 31, a black, said her only emotion today was one of happiness: “I believe the guilty verdict can help us heal. It will take time. But I think we finally have a chance to be at peace with our past in Birmingham.”

Founded in 1871 as a steel and coal town, Birmingham grew so fast as the South’s first industrial city that it became known as “Magic City.” Birmingham, though, was really two cities, with two minor league baseball teams: the (white) Barons and the Black Barons. In 1921, when President Warren G. Harding came to celebrate the city’s 50th anniversary, he warned, “Let the black man vote if he is fit to vote. And prevent the white man from voting if he is unfit to vote.”

By then, one of the most violent wings of the Ku Klux Klan had become the enforcer of just-passed “Jim Crow” laws that would turn Birmingham into America’s most segregated major city. And by the time Cherry and his band of Klansmen set out in 1963 to bomb the church where civil rights activists, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., planned much of their strategy, Alabama had elected Wallace governor on a platform of “segregation forever” and Eugene “Bull” Connor, the commissioner of public safety, had made Birmingham synonymous with water hoses, police dogs and brutal oppression.

“It’s nothing we can take pride in and no one in their right mind would say what happened was right,” said Bob Adie, a white bartender. “But that’s how the Old South was back then and Bobby Frank Cherry is a product of those times.”

The three-story, brick Baptist Church, founded in 1909, still stands at the corner of 16th Street and 6th Avenue North, its scars patched. On Sundays, songs from the congregation roll out into a lovely park, the Place of Revolution and Reconciliation, across the street and on weekdays the church is a major tourist attraction.

“With the trial over, there is a sense that justice has finally run its course after 39 years,” said Lemarse Washington, one of the church’s trustees. “The verdict itself was almost secondary in importance. What is more important in the process of healing is that the trial has opened discussion about the past and made us think about what Birmingham was and what it is.”

In 1963, blacks accounted for 47% of Birmingham’s population and owned 1% of its wealth. Today, the City Council, Board of Education and major city agencies are predominantly black. But blacks control 5% of the wealth in Birmingham, though the city is now 75% black. That, says Horace Huntley, director of Oral History at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, underscores the need to address bread-and-butter issues.

“Sure, we don’t ride in the back of the bus anymore and we go into City Hall as employees and employers, whereas before we only got in carrying mops or brooms, but there are still many problems,” said Huntley, who bought a house in 1977 next to a white family, which put up a “for sale” sign the next day.

“Unfortunately, though, when you talk about race in Birmingham, and the country as a whole, logic has a way of exiting. Our wounds haven’t healed because we’ve only used Band-Aids,” Huntley said. “We need to move to the next level of discussion. We need to improve the image of Birmingham without forgetting the history that got us to this juncture where we witness a trial for something of the magnitude of what Bobby Frank Cherry did.”

Cherry, who did not testify in his defense, is the last suspect brought to trial in the murder of Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. Thomas Blanton Jr. was convicted last year and is serving a life term. Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, was found guilty in 1977 and died in prison. A fourth suspect, Herman Cash, died in 1984 without being charged.

It is not clear what role Cherry, a man branded a racist by even his defense attorney, played in the attack on the church. Some witnesses said he lit the fuse, others that he made the bomb. Some of the most damning testimony came from a man who, as an 11-year-old, saw the four suspects at Cherry’s kitchen table a few days before the attack and heard the words “bomb” and “church.”

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Church Bombing Timeline

Sept. 15, 1963: Dynamite bomb explodes outside Sunday services at 16th Street Baptist Church, killing 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, and injuring 20 others.

May 13, 1965: FBI memo to director J. Edgar Hoover concludes the bombing was the work of former Ku Klux Klansmen Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash and Thomas E. Blanton Jr.

1968: FBI closes its investigation without filing charges.

1971: Alabama Atty. Gen. Bill Baxley reopens investigation.

Nov. 18, 1977: Chambliss convicted on a state murder charge and sentenced to life in prison.

Feb. 7, 1984: Cash dies.

Oct. 29, 1985: Chambliss dies in prison, still professing his innocence.

1988: Alabama Atty. Gen. Don Siegelman reopens the case, which is closed without action.

1993: Birmingham-area black leaders meet with FBI, agents secretly begin new review of case.

July 1997: Cherry interrogated in Texas; FBI investigation becomes public knowledge.

Oct. 27, 1998: Federal grand jury in Alabama begins hearing evidence.

May 17, 2000: Blanton and Cherry surrender on murder indictments returned by grand jury in Birmingham.

April 10, 2001: Judge delays Cherry trial, citing defendant’s medical problems amid questions over his mental competence.

May 1, 2001: Blanton convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

May 22, 2002: Cherry convicted of murder, bringing automatic sentence of life in prison.

Source: Associated Press