![]() Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash and Thomas E. Edgar Hoover, local agents wrote: “The bombing was the handiwork of former Klansmen Robert E. FBI informants in the KKK named four men who planted the bomb at the church. Local law enforcement officials were also implicated in the racist violence, with civil rights leaders estimating that at least a third of the Birmingham Police Department's officers were KKK members or sympathizers.Īs early as 1964, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had identified four men in the 1963 bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church, the center of civil rights activity in the city at the time. cited Birmingham as a “symbol of hardcore resistance to integration,” and it is well known that the Eastview Klavern 13 chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was behind the bombings. These racially motivated bomb blasts struck the businesses, homes and churches of area blacks, earning the city the nickname “Bombingham.” Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. The bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church was the twenty-first in Birmingham in eight years and the third in only 11 days, following federal orders to integrate the city's public schools. She commented after the trial that she was “very happy that justice came down.” “I didn't know if it would come in my lifetime,” she told reporters. Alpha Robertson, 82, the mother of Carole Robertson, sat in a wheelchair in the court's front row for closing arguments and the reading of the verdict. Chris and Maxine McNair, parents of victim Denise McNair, held each other as the verdict was read and then left the courtroom without comment. ![]() At the trial's conclusion last Tuesday, the jury foreperson, an unidentified black woman, wept as she read out the verdicts-one for each of the four schoolgirls. ![]() The trial in Blanton's case began in Birmingham on April 24 of this year, nearly 38 years after the bombing. Some 400 people, including 80 children, were at the church at the time, and many were injured by flying glass as the blast blew out the building's windows. The four girls were in the church basement when the blast occurred and their bodies were found underneath the rubble-mangled by the explosion's impact. as the children were assembling for closing prayers following Sunday school classes. The bomb, apparently planted under the church steps the night before, detonated at 10:19 a.m. The Septemblast took the lives of Denise McNair, 11, and Cynthia Wesley, Carole Rosamond Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, all 14. A jury of eight whites and four blacks took only two-and-a-half hours to convict Blanton, who was immediately sentenced to four life terms. Former Ku Klux Klansman Thomas Blanton, 62, was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder Tuesday, May 1 in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which left four young girls dead and injured another 22 adults and children.
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