Birmingham marks anniversary of church bombing (one of the worst acts of violence of civil rights )
Source: AP
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Birmingham residents laid wreaths Friday and planned memorial services this weekend to mark the 49th anniversary of a church bombing that killed four black children in one of the worst acts of violence during the civil rights movement.
About 80 people gathered Friday in Kelly Ingram park to remember the four children killed when members of the Ku Klux Klan bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Two other black youths were killed in violence later that tense day.
"Sometimes tragedies have to happen for us to unite," Myrna Jackson, first vice president of the Metro Birmingham NAACP, said at the rally, according to The Birmingham News (http://bit.ly/R6nDoI). "Don't fool yourself into thinking all is well, because it's not. We're on our way but we're not quite there."
The bomb exploded just before a Sunday worship service on Sept. 15, 1963, killing Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. Two more black youths, Virgil Ware and Johnny Robinson, were shot to death later that day.
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Read more: http://www.al.com/newsflash/index.ssf/story/birmingham-marks-anniversary-of-church-bombing/7742cf83f32f45a191ff8ddd2d499aa2
Also: http://www.infoplease.com/spot/bhmjustice3.html
by Borgna Brunner
The Sept. 15, 1963, bombing at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was one of the most abhorrent crimes of the civil rights movement. Four young girls attending Sunday school—Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins, aged 11 to 14—were killed when a bomb exploded at the church. Twenty others were injured. The church was a center for civil rights meetings, and just a few days earlier, courts had ordered the desegregation of Birmingham's schools.
Bobby Frank Cherry, a demolitions expert, and three other white supremacists—Robert Chambliss, Thomas Blanton, and Herman Cash—were under investigation within days of the bombing. But two years later, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover declined to pursue the case, saying the chances for conviction were "remote." In 1968, federal authorities shut down the investigation.
In the 1970s, after a U.S. Justice Department investigation revealed that former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had blocked evidence, Jefferson County, Ala., prosecutors reopened the case. More than a decade-and-a-half after the crime, the ringleader, Robert Chambliss, was convicted of one count of murder in the death of Carol McNair in 1977. He died in prison in 1985 without ever publicly admitting a role in the bombing. By this time, it was too late to try suspect Herman Cash, who had died in 1994.
The remaining two suspects in the case, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, were finally indicted in 2000—more than two decades after Chambliss's conviction—when an FBI agent in Birmingham obtained more than 9,000 FBI documents and surveillance tapes that had been kept from the original prosecutors. Blanton was convicted of murder in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison. In Cherry's trial, several of his relatives came forward to testify against him. Cherry had bragged to a number of them over the years about the bombing. In 2002, he was convicted of four counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 2004. One of the prosecutors in the case, Robert Posey, said Cherry "has worn this crime like a badge of honor."
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Old enough to remember, and to never forget.
