Echoes of 9/11 in the Church Bombing Case

Bobby Frank Cherry, known to his long-ago associates in the Ku Klux Klan as Cherry Bomb, acquired a new nickname in recent months: Osama bin Cherry. For 39 years, he eluded justice for a crime that was the worst terrorist act of its day, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., that killed four black girls in 1963.

That was a time before the word “terrorism” was in common usage, and the usual victims, powerless and largely invisible, received only cursory benedictions. But that past reached forward across four decades in the last week, when Cherry finally stood trial in Birmingham a few blocks from the church.

Images reminiscent of a more recent tragedy could be seen in photographs displayed on video monitors in the courtroom--firemen and rescue workers with a thousand-yard stare stood in the rubble of a famous building, also in a landmark American city, on a mild September day. At the time, some thought a plane had crashed into the church. On Wednesday, a jury officially laid the crime to the last suspect in the case. An unreconstructed racist at age 71, Cherry was found guilty on four counts of murder.

On Sept. 15, 1963, the conflict in question was a long-running civil war over the definition of democracy in America rather than a global clash over the definition of American democracy in the world. But the parallels between then and now are striking: The bombing of the 16th Street church, like the destruction of the World Trade Center, was the “unthinkable”--the end of a national innocence that is apparently self-renewing.

As in Birmingham, the Sept. 11 terrorists considered themselves “religious warriors” fighting off godless modernity and the imperial will of the U.S. government. In the Birmingham case, there also is an FBI scandal. The bureau’s flawed investigation of Cherry (involving a fake eyewitness account of the crime) was the substance of his defense. And in perhaps the most dramatic reprise, Sept. 11 brought home to a victimized nation the state of siege that was a fact of life for black Southerners in 1963. “It took Sept. 11 for people to relate to Sept. 15,” said Carolyn McKinstry, who was attending Sunday school at 16th Street on the morning that her four friends perished.

What a difference a year makes. In the spring of 2001, there was the giddy sense of spectacle at the trial of Cherry’s Klan brother Thomas Blanton Jr., who was convicted of the murders and is now serving a life sentence. (Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss was convicted in 1977 and died in prison. The other major suspects, Herman Cash and Troy Ingram, are dead.) The city had set aside its most elegant courtroom, and the judge extended magnanimous greetings to reporters from as far away as London and Australia, who had descended on the city with an optimistic agenda: to declare the end to an ancient sectional strife and lay those bad old days to rest. The only thing standing in the way of “closure” was the judge’s last-minute ruling that Cherry, who was to have been tried with Blanton, was mentally incompetent to assist in his defense.

By the time Cherry was deemed fit, after a year of hearings and psychiatric reevaluations, the epoch had shifted. His trial took place in a charmless basement courtroom, and this time, the judge was all business. (“Put ‘em in the box,” he summoned the jury each morning.) The prosecutors, also crisp and businesslike, let the archetypal events of 1963 speak for themselves--Martin Luther King’s nonviolent demonstrations greeted by the city of Birmingham’s fire hoses and police dogs, Gov. George Wallace’s “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” at the University of Alabama and finally that blast Sept. 15, which a victim’s mother testified “was like someone shaking the world.”

The government was no longer “hard-selling” its case to the jury (the phrase “four little girls” had been repeatedly invoked in the Blanton trial, even though three were not-so-little teenagers). But neither did the devotees of talk radio seem so compelled this time to voice their umbrage at “dragging all that up again.”

Most glaringly absent from this final church bombing trial was the hand-wringing over “closure” that had driven the news coverage not only of the Blanton trial but of the concurrent drama over another home-grown terrorist, Timothy McVeigh, whose execution had been postponed because of an FBI misstep.

Closure is a popular construct that has probably never occurred in nature. But even as a theoretical quick fix to national self-esteem, closure died in a mass grave in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. And it was a new sense of somber maturity that distinguished the Cherry trial, the sense of a democracy finally getting the hard work done.

We can no more see an end to the “war on terrorism” than children of the 1960s could envision a world without Cold War--or than Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins could imagine a world without “White Only” and “Colored” signs. The dead girls of Birmingham became moral witnesses for the higher cause of human rights. President Lyndon Johnson used their martyrdom--and the assassination that occurred two months later in Dallas--to push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished legal segregation in this country.