Justice delayed is justice denied
After 40 years, Birmingham bomber convicted
By Leslie Feinberg
Too little, too late and hard, hard won. An Alabama jury of
nine whites and three African Americans finally found Bobby
Frank Cherry guilty on May 22 of dynamiting the Sixteenth
Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963. The powerful blast
killed four children from the all-Black congregation:
11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins,
Cynthia Wesley and Carol Robertson. Scores of others were
injured.
It took decades of protest to bring this Klan member to face
a jury for this horrendous act of white supremacist terror at
the height of the U.S. civil rights movement.
The eyes of the world were on this trial, and nowhere was it
scrutinized more closely than within Black communities in
Birmingham and around the country. Newsweek notes that, until
the verdict was announced, "there was widespread
speculation--especially in Birmingham's Black community--that
Cherry might yet escape justice; that instead of a conviction
Birmingham would find itself with a hung jury--which, many in
Birmingham feared, would mean not only another painful trial,
but public protests, and maybe riots." (Newsweek, June 3)
The testimony of five family members and acquaintances
hammered the nails that helped seal Cherry's fate. They all
avowed on the witness stand that Cherry had confessed in one
form or another over the years. "Even Cherry's granddaughter, a
witness you would think would want to help and support her kin,
told the jury that her grandfather 'seemed rather jovial,
braggish' when he told her about his role in the bombing."
(CBSnews.com, May 24)
Fellow Klan members Robert Chambliss and Thomas Blanton were
convicted in 1977 and 2001. Chambliss died in custody in 1985;
Blanton is serving a life sentence. A prime suspect, Herman
Cash, died in 1994 without being charged.
Birmingham, the industrial heart of the state, was also the
heartbeat of the civil-rights movement. The Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church was the nerve center of this mass struggle to
defeat Jim Crow segregation. Activists, especially Black
youths, gathered there to chart strategies to win basic
democratic rights denied to African Americans.
The year 1963 saw the newly elected governor of the state,
George C. Wallace, boast at his inaugural that there would be
"segregation forever." He made an unsuccessful "stand in the
schoolhouse door" to bar two Black students from attending the
University of Alabama. And he unleashed snarling attack dogs
and fire hoses on Black protesters in Birmingham.
In May, thousands from the city's Black community flooded
into the streets of Birmingham in response to a call for a mass
march by Martin Luther King Jr. Fifteen hundred youth
overflowed local jails there within three days. Black people,
angered by the repression of Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor
and his storm-trooper police, hurled rocks, bricks and bottles
at the cops. The rebellion that erupted was so powerful that
President John F. Kennedy had to address the country about the
crisis in Birmingham.
The bomb was detonated inside the Sixteenth Street Baptist
Church just days after six years of protest had won the
integration of Birmingham's public schools.
African American columnist Gregory Kane recalls, "KKK
members were the shock troops used in the campaign of state
terrorism throughout the South designed to keep blacks
subjugated and submissive. In September 1963, Blanton,
Chambliss and Cherry figured that bombing the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church would strike a blow for state's rights,
segregation and white supremacy in one fell swoop. All they did
was bring about the demise of all three of those things much
more rapidly." (sunspot.net, Maryland News, May 26)
The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, a renowned civil rights leader
from Birmingham, concluded after the Cherry conviction, "The
Birmingham of yesterday is no more. The Birmingham where the
Klan rules is no more."
Case not closed
The media is saying little about the role of the FBI. The
evidence that convicted Cherry didn't suddenly come to light.
In the trials of both Cherry and Blanton, jurors heard old FBI
tapes of both men bragging about their role in the killings to
an informant. Those tapes are now almost four decades old.
(CNN.com)
The civil rights movement was the target of a "dirty war"
waged by the FBI, with neo-fascist J. Edgar Hoover at its helm.
In order to infiltrate the progressive movement, the FBI had
worked hand-in-hand with racist state and local authorities
throughout the South. The Klan, and other white supremacist
night riders, not only worked closely with these
authorities--in many cases they were one and the same.
The case cannot be closed until an independent,
community-led commission is empowered to investigate the role
of the FBI in the 1963 bombing and its cover-up.
Reprinted from the June 6, 2002, issue of
Workers World newspaper
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