1963 The Birmingham Church Bombing
In the early 1960s demands for voting rights and civil rights for African Americans were met by violence, particularly in the southern states. There, support for separation of the races was a deeply entrenched social belief and the Ku Klux Klan attracted many men (and women) who would fight for segregation. Increased media attention, the popularity of leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., and political considerations by the Kennedy regime in Washington turned up the pressure. Vigilante attacks on civil rights workers and those attempting to march or vote escalated to murder.
On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963 a bomb was placed outside Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. The church had been active in organizing protests against segregation and this made it a target in the eyes of some. At 10:22, fifteen sticks of dynamite under the porch exploded killing four children and wounding 22 others. The dead were four little girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair.
This atrocity did much to energize the civil rights movement and discredit southern segregationists but justice for the victims was not easily forthcoming. The federal government dispatched FBI agents to help in the investigation and the state of Alabama issued a paltry $5,000 reward for information. Martin Luther King condemned Governor George Wallace, a vociferous segregationist, telling him “the blood of four little children … is on your hands. Your irresponsible and misguided actions have created in Birmingham and Alabama the atmosphere that has induced continued violence and now murder.”
The FBI eventually identified 4 members of a Klan splinter group as the perpetrators — Thomas Blanton, Jr., Herman Frank Cash, Robert Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry — but no federal action was taken against them while J. Edgar Hoover headed the FBI. In the 1970s a new Alabama Attorney General secured a murder conviction against Chambliss who had purchased the dynamite. In 2000 the federal government reopened the case and convicted the two surviving bombers, Cherry and Blanton, of murder, 37 years after the deed. All four of the accused maintained their innocence throughout.