Two months later, on Sept. 15, 1963, at 10:21 a.m., dynamite reduced the church to rubble, mangling cars in the parking lot and stopping clocks.
“It sounded like the whole world was shaking,” recalled the Rev. John Haywood Cross, according to court documents. The dynamite blew plaster off the walls and peeled the face off the image of Jesus in a stained-glass window.
The pastor yelled for churchgoers to get out of the building, and then went looking for the children in the basement. The explosion had blown a hole in the side of the church so large that he walked through it to get inside the church basement.
After digging about two feet into the rubble, “they found the body of a young girl,” court documents said, and then three others. “The four bodies were found almost in the same location, as if they had been thrown on top of each other.”
The four girls killed — 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley — had been in the church basement preparing for Sunday service. Addie Mae’s sister, Sarah Collins, who was 12, lost an eye in the explosion.
The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to Wallace: “The blood of our little children is on your hands.”
King also sent a telegram to President John F. Kennedy, expressing outrage. King promised “TO PLEAD WITH MY PEOPLE TO REMAIN NON VIOLENT,” according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. But King feared unless there was quick response by the federal government, “WE SHALL SEE THE WORST RACIAL HOLOCAUST THIS NATION HAS EVER SEEN.”
More than 8,000 people attended the funeral for the girls at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church, where King delivered the eulogy.
Within days, police zeroed in on the key figures suspected of planting the dynamite. All four were vehement white supremacists, according to the National Park Service account of the crime at the Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument.
“In a 1965 memo to J. Edgar Hoover, FBI agents named four men as primary suspects for the bombing — Thomas Blanton, Robert Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, and Herman Cash,” the Park Service said.
Hoover, then the director of the FBI, blocked the prosecution and overruled the agents in Birmingham. Despite calls from Presidents Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson for prosecution, Hoover refused to make arrests.
In 1971, Bill Baxley, then attorney general in Alabama, reopened the case. Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General.”
Six years later, Chambliss was convicted of murder in the death of one of the girls, Denise McNair. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he died in 1985 at age 81.
In 1993, the case was reopened a second time at the urging of civil rights leaders. Rob Langford, then an FBI agent in Birmingham, and others began sifting through more than 9,000 documents and wiretaps that had been collected in the 1960s by the FBI office in Birmingham.
The investigation led to the arrests of Blanton and Cherry. (Cash, the fourth suspect, died in 1994 without being charged.)
Doug Jones, who in 2017 won an Alabama special election for a U.S. Senate seat, reopened the case when he was appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997 by President Bill Clinton. Jones, who had been fascinated by the case since he was a law student, connected Blanton to Cherry in his investigation.
Jones urged the FBI to release more than 9,000 files with evidence and wiretaps, including the “Kitchen-Sink Tape” wiretap of Blanton’s kitchen. An FBI agent had rented an apartment in the Blanton’s house, where the agent installed a listening device in the kitchen wall, according to court documents.
On June 28, 1964, the FBI recorded Blanton telling his wife about making a bomb.
In a packed courtroom in 2001, the jury heard the 37-year-old surveillance tape of Blanton telling his then-wife, Jeanne Blanton, that he had planned the bombing under a bridge at the Cahaba River, where the Klan’s violent cell met, according to a 2001 Washington Post story.
“What do you need a meeting for?” Jeanne Blanton asked.
“You have to have a meeting to make a bomb,” Thomas Blanton replied.
Blanton was convicted in 2001. Cherry was convicted a year later, in 2002.
A judge had initially ruled that Cherry was not mentally competent to stand trial but reversed himself after doctors concluded that Cherry was faking a mental illness.
Jones built the case against Cherry on circumstantial evidence and testimony from family members. He brought in a granddaughter who testified that Cherry once said, “He helped blow up a bunch of n-----s back in Birmingham.”
He also brought in one of Cherry’s ex-wives, who testified against him.
“He bragged about it. Bob told me he didn’t put the bomb together. He said, ‘I lit it,’ ” Willadean Brogdon told reporters on the steps of a Birmingham court in 1999.
After Cherry’s conviction, Jones told reporters, “The people of the state of Alabama proved for the second time in about a year that justice delayed does not have to be justice denied.”
Cherry died in prison in 2004. He was 74.
In August 2016, an Alabama parole board refused an early release for Blanton, who had been sentenced to life in prison. The last surviving Klansman responsible for the 16th Street Church bombing died Friday in prison, officials said. He was 81.
Gov. Kay Ivey’s office said that Blanton died of natural causes.
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