Four young Black women--Denise McNair, 11, and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson--were killed on Sept. 15, 1963, by a bomb that was placed against the church wall. Blanton, who was only the second person to stand trial out of four suspected bombers in the case, was sentenced immediately to four consecutive life terms.

"I feel that justice has been served," Jesse Horn, a retired hospital worker, told the Militant the night after the verdict. Horn was one of more than 400 people who filled the street for a candlelight vigil in front of the church. "I have always felt that the case would come to closure," he said. "Regardless of how long it's been, murder is murder." Speakers at the event, sponsored by the National Conference for Community and Justice, included religious leaders, Black and white, some of whom were veterans of the anti-segregation battles of the 1960s. Federal prosecutor Doug Jones also spoke. Marvin Hicks, a retired worker, told the Militant, "The verdict yesterday was a good one, but long overdue."

Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the key leaders in the civil rights struggle, spoke from the platform. "It took 14 years to bring the lead killer to justice," and 24 more years to put Blanton in prison, he said. "Justice that took that long is not true justice."

The stone and brick stairs and archways of the 16th Street Baptist Church lead into the meeting hall of what, by the fall of 1963, had become a symbol of the rapidly escalating fight against Jim Crow segregation. Many of the mass meetings held to organize the protests took place there, and from it marchers set out for the demonstrations that became known as the Battle of Birmingham.

For 15 years, starting in the late 1940s, the Ku Klux Klan, with the full knowledge and protection of the ruling class in the city, used bombing as a common terror tactic. Homes of Blacks in the neighborhood of North Smithfield were so frequently blown up that it was called "Dynamite Hill." In 1962, after 15 bombings, 75 volunteers from the area formed the North Smithfield Protection Association. The men armed themselves and followed any unfamiliar cars in the neighborhood. Leroy Gaillard, one of the founders of the group, told the Birmingham Post-Herald, "After the organization of the patrols, there was not another bombing in this neighborhood."

The bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church was the first that had killed anyone, though not because the rightists had not tried. Rev. Shuttlesworth faced several assassination attempts, including a bomb that went off directly behind the bed he was lying in, on Christmas night, 1956.

Birmingham's mine, foundry, and steel mill owners, led by the capitalists of the United States Steel corporation, had kept wages and working conditions poor for many decades through the legal division of the working class called Jim Crow segregation.

Far from intimidating the civil rights movement, the bombing galvanized support for the struggle around the country. After the Birmingham killings, young people came from many states to back the fight for voting rights and to tear down the brutal Jim Crow system. The growing social movement of working people, who faced murderous attacks by the police and rightists, would force the federal government to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In the aftermath of the bombing, local, state, and federal cops--all of whom had ties through paid agents, common interests, and common membership lists to the KKK and other rightist outfits--conducted "investigations" of the attack. The government did not prosecute anyone at the time.

William Baxley, former attorney general of Alabama, wrote in a May 3 op-ed column in the New York Times, titled, "Why Did the FBI Hold Back Evidence?" that he reopened the investigation of the murders in 1971. "After a few false starts, my staff and I identified" Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Herman Cash, all members of a Ku Klux Klan group, as the bombers. "These individuals had been identified by the FBI when the 1963 bombings occurred," Baxley wrote.

The former attorney general said that in requesting information he was "repeatedly stonewalled" by the FBI, which only began to share evidence after the Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times "went to the officials at the Justice Department and threatened to reveal the FBI's refusal to cooperate with our investigation." Baxley won a conviction of Chambliss in 1977, but not of the other three. "The bottom line," he told the Times, "is the FBI handed Tom Blanton a get-out-of-jail-free card that was good for 24 years, and they handed one to Cherry that may be good for more than that."

Baxley was not told of tapes held by the FBI that had been secretly recorded in Blanton's home in which he spoke to his wife of a meeting to "plan the bomb." According to press reports, evidence presented in the recent trial of Blanton was entirely circumstantial and relied heavily on the tape recordings, done at the time without a warrant.

Direct testimony linking Blanton to the murders was scant, as witnesses and codefendants have either died, could not testify due to ill health, or said their memory of Blanton being at the church the day before the bombing was hazy due to the passage of time. Chambliss died in prison in 1985, Herman Cash died without facing prosecution, and Cherry, who was indicted for murder last year at the same time as Blanton, has been ruled mentally incompetent to stand trial.
 
 
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Cincinnati protesters condemn leniency for killer cop
Protest in New Jersey condemns police killing
Penn State students respond to racist threats  
 
 
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