Fifty years ago today, members of the Ku Klux
Klan detonated a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in
Birmingham, Alabama. The bombing marked
the climax of the Klan’s terror campaign against the city’s African-American
residents generally and civil rights activism in particular. 16th Street Baptist was at the
center of Birmingham’s civil rights struggle in the early 1960s and was a
natural target for white supremacist violence.
Although Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, the
Klan ringleader in the bombing, claimed the bomb was meant to go off before
that morning’s service when the church was unoccupied, the blast killed four
girls attending Sunday school in the church basement. Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole
Robertson, and Denise McNair perished. Nearly two dozen more people were injured.
The bombing focused the world’s attention on
Birmingham, a city with a white establishment determined to postpone desegregation
as long as possible. The prosecution of
the bombers, whose identities were known early on, did not take place until
fourteen years after the fact. Bill
Baxley, Alabama’s young Attorney General, had been horrified by the act and
once in office made a concerted effort to bring the bombers to account.
Chambliss went to prison in 1978, where he
died seven years later. It took much
longer to bring in his accomplices. Bobby
Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton were finally convicted in 2001. Cherry died in prison in 2004. Herman Frank Cash escaped justice altogether,
dying in 1994. It took a good deal of
courage for witnesses to come forward, even years later. The late Rev. Petric J. Smith was a key witness at the trial of his uncle, Robert Chambliss. Following the trial Smith was forced to leave
Birmingham for good. Had the trial taken
place today, it’s quite possible he still would have been run out of town. The New South may appear to have shed the
darker burdens of its past, but the old attitudes lurk beneath the surface.
The memory of the 16th Street
Baptist Church bombing persists in our collective consciousness, albeit
tenuously. As our leaders are so fond of
reminding us, we live under the constant threat of terror. We should remember that on so many occasions
in our history, we victimized our own.
