ALABAMA 1963 Cold Case Solved After 39 Years — Justice for the 4 Girls of 16th Street Baptist Church
On the morning of Sunday, September 15th, 1963, four young girls stood in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Denise McNair, 11 years old, asked Addie Mae Collins to tie the sash on her dress.
Addie Mae was 14, as were Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson beside them.
The girls were getting ready for Youth Day.
Just 19 days earlier, Martin Luther King stood before 250,000 people in Washington and said, “I have a dream”.
For the first time, people felt that dream might come true.
>> >> The bow was never tied.
At 10:22 am, 15 sticks of dynamite beneath the stairs went off.
Four girls were killed.
The youngest was only 11.
A fifth girl, Addie Mae’s younger sister, >> >> survived with shards of glass lodged in her left eye for decades.
The bombers left a trail everywhere.
Witnesses saw a 1957 Chevrolet parked beside the church at 2:00 am One suspect, nicknamed Dynamite Bob, had bought 122 sticks of dynamite just days earlier.
Witnesses heard the suspects talking about bomb and 16th Street.
The FBI identified four suspects within weeks.
It was enough evidence to convict in any other court, but this was Alabama in 1963.
FBI Director J.
Edgar Hoover locked down the files.
The mastermind was fined only $100 for possessing explosives, not for killing four children.
By 1968, the files were closed completely.
>> >> Four murderers lived free in Alabama, some of them boasting openly about what they had done.
It would take 39 years, a 29-year-old attorney general who refused to let the case die, a prosecutor who turned a childhood obsession into a legal mission, testimony from the perpetrators’ own wives and children, and one secret tape recording before justice finally found the four little girls in the church basement.
This is the story of how a case that went cold for nearly four decades in the history of American civil rights was finally cracked.
And it began long before the bomb was placed beneath the stairs.
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>> >> To understand why four little girls died in a church basement that morning, you have to understand what Birmingham, Alabama was like in 1963.
Birmingham wasn’t just a segregated city.
It was the most violently segregated city in America.
From 1947 to 1963, more than 50 bombs exploded targeting black homes and churches in Birmingham.
Not a single person was arrested.
Not a single case was solved.
The bombings became so frequent that the city earned its own nickname.
They called it Bombingham.
That wasn’t a nickname coined by the northern press.
The people of Birmingham themselves called their city that.
The city had no black police officers, no black firefighters.
Police Commissioner with fire hoses and police dogs, and he made no effort to hide it.
He was proud of it.
In Bull Connor’s world, segregation wasn’t something to be covered up.
It was official policy.
Martin Luther King Jr.
once called Birmingham’s government the symbol of the most entrenched resistance to racial integration.
And right in the heart of that city, across from Kelly Ingram Park, stood the 16th Street Baptist Church, a three-story red brick building, the largest and most famous church of Birmingham’s black community.
The church wasn’t just a place of worship.
It was the unofficial headquarters of the civil rights movement in Birmingham.
When the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Congress of Racial Equality launched the Birmingham campaign in the spring of 1963, the church was where they planned it.
When the protest took place, the church was where they set out from.
When Martin Luther King needed a stage to rally Birmingham, he stood in this church.
On May 2nd, 1963, more than 1,000 students, some as young as eight, left school and gathered at the 16th Street Baptist Church in the historic event known as the Children’s Crusade.
They marched into the streets.
Bull Connor ordered high-pressure fire hoses and police dogs turned on the children.
>> >> The images appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the world.
They made Birmingham a global symbol of racist brutality, and they made the 16th Street Baptist Church a target.
For white extremists who wanted to send a message to the civil rights movement, there was no clearer target than this church.
They didn’t choose it at random.
They chose it because it was the heart of the movement, and they wanted to rip that heart apart.
The September 15th bombing was the third explosion in Birmingham in 11 days after a federal order to integrate Alabama’s school system was issued.
Just five days earlier, the first black children had enrolled at Graymont Elementary School, a whites-only school.
Alabama was changing, and those who didn’t want change were growing desperate.
Now, let’s talk about the four girls because they aren’t just numbers.
They were children with names, families, and dreams with lives that were just opening up before them.
Addie Mae Collins was born on April 18th, 1949.
She was 14, quiet and gentle, and always walked to church with her sisters.
Childhood friends remembered her as the gentlest one in the group.
Cynthia Wesley was born on April 30th, 1949, also 14.
She was an adopted daughter, a strong student, and ambitious.
Her adoptive parents were teachers, >> >> and they had taught her to believe that education was the way out of every barrier Alabama put in front of her.
Carol Robertson was born on April 24th, 1949, 14 years old.
She was a member of the church band, a girl scout, an honor student, and a member of the science club.
Of the four girls, Carol was the most active, always with a packed schedule, always signing up for one more club, always looking forward.
Carol Denise McNair was born on November 17th, 1951.
She was only 11, the youngest in the group, nearly 3 years younger than the other three girls.
Her father, Chris McNair, was a photographer.
>> >> He had taken hundreds of photographs of his daughter, and those photographs, Denise smiling, Denise playing, Denise in her Sunday dress, would become the face of this tragedy for decades afterward.
That morning, September 15th, 1963, was Youth Day at the 16th Street Baptist Church.
The young people were to lead the service.
The sermon that day was titled A Love That Forgives.
In the basement, five girls were in the women’s restroom straightening their dresses.
>> >> The four girls mentioned above, and Sarah Collins, 12, Addie Mae’s younger sister.
At about 10:22 am, an anonymous call came into the church.
Carolyn Mall, 14, the Sunday school secretary, answered the phone.
Before she could react, the bomb went off.
15 sticks of dynamite placed beneath the stairs, right next to the basement women’s restroom, exploded with enough force to blast a hole nearly 7 ft long and more than 2 ft deep in the brick wall.
The blast completely devastated the entire rear of the church basement.
Beams collapsed.
Windows were blown out.
Inside the wreckage, beneath the rubble and concrete, the bodies of the four girls were found.
The explosion was so powerful that one of the bodies was severely disfigured, identifiable only by clothing and a ring.
22 others were injured, and Sarah Collins, the fifth girl, lay amid the wreckage, alive but with dozens of shards of glass embedded in her left eye.
>> >> She would permanently lose vision in that eye.
Decades later, Sarah recalled the last moment before the explosion.
Denise was asking Addie Mae to tie the sash on her dress.
It was the last image she saw with both eyes.
News of the bombing spread across America within hours.
Birmingham sank into violence.
That same day, September 15th, 1963, two more black teenagers were killed in the city.
Virgil Ware, 13, was sitting on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle when he was shot dead with a pistol by two white teenagers riding a motorcycle.
>> >> The two shooters, Larry Joe Sims and Michael Lee Farley, both 16, had just left a pro-segregation rally.
Johnny Robinson, also 16, was shot dead by Birmingham police when he threw rocks at a car flying a Confederate flag.
Six black children were killed in one day in Birmingham, Alabama.
Think about that number.
Six children, one day, one city.
At the 16th Street Baptist Church, the scene afterward looked like a war zone.
The entire rear of the basement was destroyed.
Stained glass windows were blown out, including one depicting Jesus, in which his face was blown away completely while his body remained intact.
That image, Jesus without a face, became one of the most painful symbols of the bombing.
The girls’ parents were called to identify their children.
Chris McNair, Denise’s father, a photographer who had spent his life taking pictures of his daughter, now had to stand before the body of his 11-year-old girl.
He later said that moment took away a part of him that he never got back.
Alpha Robertson, Carol’s mother, got the news while at another church.
Claude Wesley, Cynthia’s adoptive father, a school principal, drove to the church and stood looking at the wreckage where his daughter had stood just hours before.
Oscar Adams Collins, Addie Mae’s father, had to face the reality that one daughter was dead and another, Sarah, was lying in the hospital with glass embedded in her eye.
The funerals took place the following week.
Carol Robertson was buried separately on September 17th in a blue casket at Shadowlawn Cemetery at her family’s request.
On September 18th, a joint funeral for Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Denise McNair was held at the 6th Avenue Baptist Church because the 16th Street Baptist Church had been too badly damaged.
More than 8,000 people attended.
Martin Luther King Jr.
delivered the eulogy.
>> >> He called the four girls martyrs of a holy crusade for freedom.
He said their deaths had meaning, that their brief lives spoke to every black and white person in this country, saying that the most precious things in life can be taken away in an instant by people blinded by hatred.
But the most remarkable thing about the funeral that day wasn’t the eulogy.
It was the absence.
Not one Birmingham city official attended.
Not one Alabama state official attended.
Governor George Wallace, who just 3 months earlier had stood in the doorway of the University of Alabama and declared segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever, sent no condolences.
The reaction from outside Alabama was entirely different.
President Kennedy called the bombing a revolting and tragic act.
>> >> Charles Morgan Jr.
, a white attorney in Birmingham, stood before a group of the city’s white businessmen the next day and said bluntly, “Birmingham is not a city dying.
It is dead”.
That speech brought Morgan so many threats that he had to leave Alabama.
Internationally, the bombing was a public relations disaster for the United States.
In the context of the Cold War, America was trying to persuade African and Asian countries >> >> that democracy was better than communism.
Then, the image of a bombed black church and four little girls killed appeared on the front page of every newspaper in the world.
The Soviet Union immediately used the bombing as a propaganda weapon.
The FBI was ordered to step in.
Within days of the explosion, investigators began to focus on one particular group, a KKK splinter group calling itself the Cahaba Boys, named after the Cahaba River that runs through the suburbs of Birmingham.
The Cahaba Boys were formed in early 1963 by members of Eastview Klavern number 13, the most extreme clan chapter in Alabama.
They broke away for a simple reason.
They felt the KKK was growing too soft.
While the mainstream KKK burned crosses and made threats, the Cahaba Boys wanted real action.
They wanted bombs.
The group had fewer than 30 active members, but among them were four men the FBI quickly identified as prime suspects.
Robert Edward Chambliss, 59, nicknamed Dynamite Bob, >> >> not because he liked dynamite, but because he had used dynamite many times before.
Chambliss was the most seasoned man in the group, a retired mechanic with a history of racial violence stretching back decades.
One witness identified him as the man who placed a box beneath the church stairs the night before the explosion.
Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
, 25, born on the same day as the third suspect.
Blanton grew up in a white supremacist family.
His father, Thomas Blanton Sr.
, was also a KKK member.
>> >> Blanton’s Chevrolet was seen by witnesses parked near the church in the early morning hours of September 15th.
Bobby Frank Cherry, 33, born June 20th, 1930 in Clanton, Alabama.
Cherry was a welder and truck driver, a violent man known for beating his wife and children to assert power in the household.
>> >> His first wife, Virginia, died of cancer in 1968.
And Herman Frank Cash, 45, the leader of Eastview Klavern number 13.
Cash was the highest-ranking member of the local KKK, but acquaintances later said he was too nervous to carry out a crime on this scale personally.
Cash’s exact role in the bombing was never fully established in court.
These four men, Chambliss, Blanton, Cherry, and Cash, were the four murderers the FBI identified.
The early evidence pointed straight at them.
The question wasn’t who did it.
>> >> The question was whether Alabama in 1963 was willing to punish four white men for killing four black children.
The evidence against the four suspects in the first weeks after the bombing was very strong.
Robert Chambliss had bought 122 sticks of dynamite from a building supply store just days before the explosion.
He made no effort to hide the purchase.
He used his real name.
A witness named Curthis Glenn saw Chambliss and Blanton place an object beneath the church stairs the night before the explosion.
Witness Bobby Birdwell testified that he had seen Cherry standing and talking with three other men and clearly heard two words, bomb and 16th Street.
Blanton’s blue and white 1957 Chevrolet was identified by multiple witnesses parked near the church in the early morning hours of September 15th.
A former waitress named Mary Frances Cunningham testified that she had seen Blanton drive past the church multiple times days before the explosion.
And Chambliss’s niece, Elizabeth Cobbs, would later testify that her uncle had told her before the bombing, “Wait until after Sunday.
They will beg us to stop”.
That was the evidence.
Eyewitnesses, physical evidence, testimony from the suspects’ own relatives.
>> >> In any normal justice system, this was enough to put four men on trial and convict them.
But this was not a normal justice system.
This was Alabama in 1963.
In October 1963, Robert Chambliss was arrested, >> >> but not for murder.
He was charged with illegal possession and transportation of explosives.
That was all.
Four children dead, and the heaviest charge the Alabama justice system could bring was possession of explosives.
Chambliss was convicted, fined $100, and given a 6-month suspended sentence.
$100.
Let that number sink in.
Four lives, three 14-year-old girls, and one 11-year-old girl, and the Alabama justice system priced justice at $25 a life.
Blanton, Cherry, and Cash weren’t even charged with anything.
They went home.
They went on with their normal lives.
>> >> No one was prosecuted for murder.
Meanwhile, the FBI continued investigating quietly.
By 1965, the Bureau’s internal investigation had reached a clear conclusion.
Director J.
Edgar Hoover signed off, confirming that the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church had been carried out by four identified KKK members: Thomas Edwin Blanton, Jr.
, Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank Cherry.
Four names, four murderers, spelled out in FBI files.
And what did Hoover do with that conclusion? He locked it all down.
He didn’t pass it to prosecutors, he didn’t recommend prosecution, he didn’t notify the victims’ families.
He locked the files away and let them sit in a cabinet.
To understand why Hoover blocked the case, you have to understand Hoover’s relationship with the civil rights movement.
And that relationship can be summed up in one word: hostility.
Hoover viewed the civil rights movement not as a movement for equality, but as a national security threat.
>> >> He believed, or at least claimed to believe, that the movement was infiltrated and controlled by communists.
>> >> The FBI’s COINTELPRO program devoted much of its resources to surveilling, sabotaging, and discrediting civil rights leaders, especially Martin Luther King Jr.
Hoover called King a charlatan and considered him the most dangerous enemy of America.
>> >> In that context, prosecuting four KKK bombers and turning the case into a symbol of the civil rights movement was the last thing Hoover wanted to do.
A public trial would draw national attention.
It would create martyrs.
>> >> It would energize the movement Hoover was trying so hard to destroy.
So, he buried the files.
>> >> But, there was another factor that made the FBI’s investigation far more complicated and suspicious.
Gary Thomas Rowe Jr.
>> >> Rowe was an FBI informant, a KKK member paid by the FBI to report on the organization’s activities from the inside.
Rowe had been present in Eastview Klavern number 13, the same chapter as Chambliss, Blanton, Cherry, and Cash.
On paper, Rowe was the FBI’s most valuable intelligence asset inside the Alabama KKK.
In reality, Rowe’s role was far more complicated.
Rowe was suspected of taking part in numerous acts of violence while working as an FBI informant, including the 1961 attack on the Freedom Riders at the Birmingham bus station, when Rowe was alleged to have beaten passengers alongside other KKK members while the FBI knew in advance and did not intervene.
And here is the most important detail.
When questioned about his involvement in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, Gary Thomas Rowe failed lie detector tests twice.
Twice.
Same question, same result.
Rowe said he wasn’t involved.
The lie detector said he was lying.
The FBI never fully explained this result.
They didn’t prosecute Rowe.
They didn’t remove him from his position as an informant.
>> >> They kept paying him.
And Robert Chambliss, until the day he died, always insisted that it was Gary Thomas Rowe who planted the bomb, not him.
Was Rowe actually involved? That question was never definitively answered.
Rowe died in 1998 without ever being prosecuted for any crime connected to the bombing, but the fact that the FBI had used an informant who may have taken part in the very attack and then locked down the files cast an enormous shadow over the entire original investigation.
In 1968, J.
Edgar Hoover formally closed the 16th Street Baptist Church case file.
No prosecution, no explanation, no notice to the public.
The files were sealed.
The case was clinically dead, and this was the reality America faced at the end of the 1960s.
>> >> Four little girls lay in their graves.
Addie Mae at Greenwood Cemetery, Cynthia at Greenwood Cemetery, Carol at Shadow Lawn Cemetery, Denise at Shadow Lawn Cemetery.
The four who killed them had been identified by the FBI by name, by evidence, by official conclusion, and all four were living free in Alabama.
Chambliss had paid his $100 fine and gone back to his daily life.
>> >> Blanton went on working and driving his Chevrolet on the same roads where he had planted the bomb.
Cherry moved to Texas and then came back, continuing a normal life.
Cash lived undisturbed in Pinson, Alabama, less than 20 miles from Birmingham.
>> >> No one was prosecuted.
No one was tried for murder.
Four girls were dead, >> >> and the justice system had looked the other way.
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>> >> For 3 years after Hoover closed the files, the case lay in the dark.
No one touched it.
No one talked about it.
The Alabama justice system considered the case finished, and so did most of America.
Then, in 1971, a 29-year-old man changed everything.
Bill Baxley took office as Alabama’s Attorney General in January 1971, becoming the youngest Attorney General in the state’s history.
He grew up in Dothan, Alabama, more than 250 miles southeast of Birmingham.
When the bombing happened in 1963, Baxley was just 22 and in law school.
But the image of four little girls dead in a church basement had haunted him for years.
He kept a photograph of the four girls on his desk and he looked at it every day.
It wasn’t a symbolic gesture.
It was a reminder.
The moment he took office, Baxley did something no one before him had dared to do.
He demanded that the FBI hand over its entire investigative file on the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
The FBI refused.
Hoover was still alive in 1971 and he had no intention of opening the files to anyone.
Baxley persisted.
He sent a second request, refused a second time.
He sent a third, refused a third time.
He didn’t stop.
Then, on May 2nd, 1972, J.
Edgar Hoover died.
He was 77, having run the FBI for 48 years.
And with his death, the wall of secrecy began to crack.
Not immediately, not easily, but gradually, pieces of the files began to be transferred to Baxley’s office.
What Baxley saw in the files confirmed what he had suspected.
The FBI had known who planted the bomb.
They had the evidence.
They had the witnesses.
And they had chosen not to act.
Baxley spent six years rebuilding the case from the pile of sealed files, re-interviewing witnesses, searching for new evidence.
He focused on Robert Chambliss, Dynamite Bob, because he believed Chambliss was the one with the most evidence against him and the clearest mastermind.
On September 26th, 1977, Robert Edward Chambliss, 73, was indicted by a Jefferson County Grand Jury on four counts of first-degree murder for the deaths of the four girls.
14 years after the bombing, for the first time, one of the suspects was charged with murder.
The trial opened in November 1977 before Judge Wallace Gipson.
Baxley personally stood before the jury as prosecutor.
>> >> His most important witness was Elizabeth Cobbs, Chambliss’s own niece.
Cobbs took the witness stand and testified against her own uncle.
She testified that on the night before the bombing, Chambliss had said something to her that she never forgot.
“Wait until after Sunday.
They will beg us to stop”.
Think about the weight of that moment.
A woman sitting in a courtroom, looking her own uncle in the eye, and telling the jury what he had said before four children died.
Cobbs knew her testimony would destroy her family.
She testified anyway.
The jury deliberated for about 6 hours.
>> >> On November 18th, 1977, Robert Edward Chambliss was found guilty of first-degree murder.
The sentence? Life in prison.
But there is one important detail to understand.
Chambliss was convicted for the death of only one of the four girls, Carol Denise McNair, the 11-year-old.
Not because the evidence related only to Denise, but because of Baxley’s legal strategy.
He focused on one victim to simplify the case for the jury.
Chambliss was convicted.
One man, after 14 years, for the death of one of the four girls.
It was justice, but it wasn’t complete, >> >> and Baxley knew it.
He wanted to prosecute Blanton, Cherry, and Cash, but he didn’t have enough direct evidence to take them to trial with any assurance of conviction.
Witnesses had died or refused to cooperate.
Physical evidence had deteriorated over 14 years, and the political reality of Alabama, though changed enough to convict Chambliss, still wasn’t ready for three more trials.
>> >> The case went cold again.
Chambliss was sent to state prison.
He never showed a single second of remorse.
Until the day he died, he firmly denied his role and blamed Gary Thomas Rowe, the FBI informant.
Chambliss told anyone who would listen that Rowe was the one who planted the bomb, that the FBI had protected Rowe, >> >> and that he was the victim of a conspiracy.
No one could fully verify or disprove that claim.
Rowe remained free, never prosecuted.
On October 29th, 1985, Robert Edward Chambliss died in an Alabama prison.
He was 81.
He had served 8 years of his life sentence.
He died with a claim of innocence on his lips.
The three remaining suspects continued to live free.
Then, one of them escaped the reach of justice in the most permanent way.
On February 7th, 1994, Herman Frank Cash died in Pinson, Alabama.
He was 75.
He had never been prosecuted, never been tried, never had to stand before a jury and answer for the deaths of four little girls.
Cash died in his own bed, >> >> in his own home, a free man.
The fourth suspect had escaped justice forever.
Now, only two remained.
Thomas Blanton Jr.
and Bobby Frank Cherry.
Both were still alive.
Both were still free.
And the case? The case the FBI had solved in 1965, the case Baxley had reopened in 1971, the case a jury had ruled on in 1977, sank back into silence.
20 years of silence.
From 1977 to the late 1990s, there was no significant movement.
No new prosecutions, no new investigations.
The files sat in a cabinet.
Throughout those two decades, Sarah Collins Rudolph, the fifth girl, Addie Mae’s younger sister, lived in a kind of paralysis that she later described as feeling trapped between the past and the present.
She became too frightened to return to worship at the 16th Street Baptist Church.
The church had been rebuilt, the windows repaired, but every time she looked at the building, she saw the wreckage.
She saw her sister.
She saw the bow that never got tied.
The shards of glass remained in her body, in her left eye, in her abdomen, in her chest, like physical fragments of memory that her body refused to release.
The families of the other victims also lived in their own darkness.
Chris McNair, Denise’s father, continued working as a photographer and later became a Birmingham City Council member and then a state legislator.
But friends said that after the bombing, a part of him never came back.
Alpha Robertson, Carol’s mother, lived the rest of her life with the question every parent in this situation must carry.
Why my child? The answer never came.
There was no reason.
Carol Robertson didn’t die because of anything she did.
She died because she was there.
She died because she was black in Alabama in 1963 and went to church on the wrong morning.
By the mid-1990s, it seemed the story would end here.
Chambliss had died in prison.
Cash had died free.
Blanton and Cherry were growing old.
The Alabama justice system had given up.
And then, an event in Mississippi, more than 200 miles from Birmingham, changed everything.
In February 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in Mississippi for the 1963 assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers, 31 years after the murder.
Beckwith’s conviction proved something many had thought impossible, that a cold case from the civil rights era could be brought to trial and successfully prosecuted after decades.
That time was not a shield for killers.
That a jury in the 1990s could look at the evidence of the 1960s and say a word that earlier juries had refused to say, guilty.
The domino effect began.
If Mississippi could convict Beckwith after 31 years, what could Alabama do with the 16th Street Baptist Church case? The answer came in 1996 when the FBI and the US Department of Justice officially announced the reopening of the investigation into the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.
The state of Alabama joined in.
For the first time in nearly three decades, the case had the simultaneous attention of both the federal government and the state.
But attention alone was not enough.
The case needed one person willing to carry it into a courtroom.
>> >> That person was Doug Jones.
Douglas Jones was appointed US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997 under President Bill Clinton.
He was 43 years old when he took office, but his connection to the bombing began when he was only nine.
>> >> Jones grew up in Fairfield, Alabama, less than 10 miles from downtown Birmingham.
>> >> When the bomb exploded on the morning of September 15th, 1963, >> >> he was a white boy in the suburbs living in a world where, as he later admitted, he knew almost nothing about what was happening to black children less than 10 miles from his home.
The real awakening came in 1977 when Jones was a second-year student at Cumberland School of Law.
Attorney General Bill Baxley brought Robert Chambliss to trial, and Jones skipped class to sit in the balcony of the Jefferson County courtroom and watch the proceedings.
He later called it the trial of the century.
He watched Baxley present the evidence.
He watched Elizabeth Cobbs testify against her uncle.
He watched the jury find Chambliss guilty.
>> >> And that experience engraved in him one belief that he carried throughout his career.
That justice may come late, but it can still come.
Now, more than 20 years later, Jones was in a position to turn that belief into action.
As a US Attorney, he had no authority to prosecute directly in state court since murder is a state crime, but he began the investigation from the federal side, using FBI resources to rebuild the case from the ground up.
And when the evidence was strong enough, he was appointed by the Alabama Attorney General as a special prosecutor to try the case in state court.
>> >> Jones approached the case in what he called starting from the church.
He did not start with the suspects.
He started with the victims.
Not just the four girls, but the church itself.
He called the church the fifth victim.
>> >> He wanted the jury to understand why this church was chosen, why the four girls were there, and why the bombing was not an impulsive act, but a calculated one meant to destroy a symbol of the civil rights movement in Birmingham.
But strategy required evidence, and the evidence came from sources no one had anticipated.
The first source was Mitchell Burns.
Burns was an acquaintance of Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry at the time of the bombing.
In the late 1960s, the FBI recruited Burns as an informant and asked him to wear a hidden recording device when he met with Blanton and Cherry.
Burns agreed.
He rode in cars with Blanton and sat in Cherry’s home with the tape rolling in his pocket the whole time.
Most of the conversations contained nothing significant, but one recording made in Blanton’s car changed everything.
On that tape, Blanton and Burns talk, and the subject turns to the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Blanton does not directly say, “I planted the bomb”.
But he speaks about the bombing with approval, with the familiarity of someone directly involved.
And he laughs.
He laughs about the deaths of four children.
Burns also reported unrecorded comments, times when Blanton and Cherry referred to their roles in the bombing more directly.
This unrecorded testimony, combined with the recording, formed one of the pillars of the new case.
The second source came from Bobby Cherry’s own family.
Willadean Brogdon, Cherry’s third wife, was married to him from 1970 to 1973.
The marriage lasted only 3 years, but in those 3 years, Cherry told her many things.
The worst, according to Brogdon, was that Cherry said he had planted the bomb that destroyed the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963.
Cherry did not say it with remorse.
He said it with pride.
>> >> Thomas Frank Cherry, Bobby Cherry’s son, also spoke up.
He testified that his father was a member of the United Klans of America and that his father had bragged many times about his role in the bombing.
A son testifying against his father.
An ex-wife testifying against her ex-husband.
>> >> The most intimate relationships in Bobby Cherry’s life became the weapons that destroyed him.
Cherry created the evidence against himself by being unable to stop talking.
Like Byron De La Beckwith in the Medgar Evers case, Cherry believed he was safe, that time had protected him, that no one would ever bring him to court.
He was wrong.
In May 2000, a Jefferson County Grand Jury in Birmingham indicted both Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
and Bobby Frank Cherry, each on four counts of first-degree murder.
37 years after the bombing, two of the four final killers faced justice.
Thomas Blanton’s trial opened on April 15th, 2001 before Judge James Garrett in Birmingham.
Doug Jones stood before the jury as lead prosecutor alongside Robert Posey and Jeff Wallace.
Blanton’s defense attorney was John C.
Robbins.
Jones built the case in layers.
>> >> He began with the church, its history, its role in the movement, the reason it became a target.
Then he introduced the four girls.
Then came the physical evidence, the Chevrolet car and the witnesses who had seen it near the church.
And finally, he played the Mitchell-Burns recording for the jury.
The courtroom fell completely silent as Blanton’s voice came from the recorder.
The voice of a man discussing the murder of four children with the demeanor of someone talking about the weather.
Blanton did not take the witness stand.
The defense attorney tried to sow doubt about the quality of the recording, about Burns’ credibility, about whether the voice on the tape was really Blanton’s.
But the evidence was too heavy.
On May 1st, 2001, the jury returned to the courtroom after about 2 and 1/2 hours of deliberation.
>> >> Guilty.
Four counts of first-degree murder.
Four [snorts] life sentences.
Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
, 62 years old, was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs.
>> >> 38 years after he helped place dynamite under the church steps, he finally paid the price.
But there was still Cherry.
Bobby Frank Cherry’s trial was originally scheduled to take place right after Blanton’s, but it was delayed because Cherry and his attorneys claimed that Cherry had dementia >> >> and was not mentally competent to stand trial.
The court ordered a psychiatric evaluation.
Doctors examined Cherry and concluded that although he had some mental health problems, he was fully competent to understand the charges against him and to take part in his own defense.
Cherry was lucid enough to stand trial.
Cherry’s trial opened in May 2002.
Jones returned in the role of special prosecutor.
This time, his main weapon was not a recording, but Cherry’s own relatives.
Willadean Brogdon took the witness stand and told the jury what her ex-husband had said, that he planted the bomb, that he was proud of it.
>> >> Thomas Frank Cherry testified that his father bragged about the bombing.
Witness Bobby Birdwell testified that he had heard Cherry talking about bombs and 16th Street with three other men on the eve of the explosion.
Cherry denied everything.
The defense attorneys tried to shift blame onto the dead, Chambliss and Cash, arguing that their client was not directly involved.
Cherry declared his innocence and called all the witnesses liars.
>> >> On May 22nd, 2002, the jury answered, “Guilty”.
>> >> Four counts of first-degree murder.
Four life sentences.
Bobby Frank Cherry, 71 years old, was convicted.
When the verdict was read, Cherry turned to a reporter and said, “This whole bunch lied from start to finish”.
No remorse.
No acknowledgement.
Not one word for the four girls he had killed.
>> >> By the time the final verdict was read in May 2002, nearly 39 years had passed since that Sunday morning.
Three of the four bombers had been convicted.
The fourth had died before justice could reach him.
But the story does not end in the courtroom.
It ends with what happened afterward.
With the survivors, with the killers, and with a country that had to wait nearly four decades to say a word that should have been said in 1963.
Let’s begin with the killers, because their fates say a great deal about the nature of delayed justice.
>> >> Robert Edward Chambliss, the mastermind, Dynamite Bob, was convicted in 1977 and died in an Alabama prison on October 29th, 1985.
He was 81 years old.
He served eight years of his life sentence.
>> >> Until his last breath, he insisted he was innocent and blamed Gary Thomas Rowe.
He never apologized.
He never admitted anything.
He died the way he lived, in complete denial.
Herman Frank Cash, the fourth suspect, died on February 7th, 1994 in Pinson, Alabama at the age of 75.
He was never prosecuted.
He never had to stand before a jury.
He never had to hear the word guilty directed at him.
Cash died in his own bed, in his own home, surrounded by family, a free man.
Of the four killers, Cash is the only one the justice system failed completely.
Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in May 2002 and transferred to Kilby Correctional Facility in Montgomery, Alabama.
He lived another two and a half years in prison.
On November 18th, 2004, Cherry died at Kilby.
He was 74 years old.
The cause of death was not disclosed in detail.
He died in confinement, far from the family he had abused, far from the world he had tried to keep segregated.
He never showed remorse.
>> >> His last recorded words on the case remained the statement he made in the courtroom.
This whole bunch lied from start to finish.
Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
lived the longest in prison.
After being convicted in 2001, he filed an appeal.
It was denied.
He applied for parole in 2016.
The Alabama Parole Board denied it.
Blanton was the last surviving convicted bomber, and he would die in that status.
On June 26th, 2020, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr.
died in an Alabama state prison.
>> >> He was 82 years old.
The Alabama governor’s office announced his death along with a brief statement about the bombing.
There were no condolences for Blanton.
The last of the Cahaba boys was dead.
Now, let’s talk about the people who brought the case to justice, because their lives after the verdicts are also worth telling.
>> >> Doug Jones, the prosecutor who convicted Blanton and Cherry, left his post as US Attorney in 2001.
>> >> He returned to private law practice, but the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing had shaped him in ways that could not be reversed.
In 2017, Jones ran for the US Senate to represent Alabama in a special election.
He defeated Roy Moore and became Alabama’s first Democratic Senator in 25 years.
During the campaign, the legacy of the church bombing case was at the center of his story, >> >> the man who had brought justice to four little girls.
He served in the Senate from 2018 to 2021.
>> >> In 2019, he published the book Bending Toward Justice, recounting the prosecution, which became the most important account written by an insider about the case.
Bill Baxley, the 29-year-old attorney general who reopened the case in 1971 and convicted Chambliss in 1977, continued his political career.
He ran for governor of Alabama, but lost.
He returned to practicing law.
But in Alabama’s history, his name will forever be tied to one act of courage.
He was the first to refuse to let the case die when everyone around him said it was already dead.
And Sarah Collins Rudolph, the fifth girl, Addie Mae’s younger sister, the only survivor in the basement women’s restroom that morning.
>> >> After the trials, Sarah told reporters she was still angry about the nearly four-decade delay in prosecution, but she hoped the killers had repented before they died.
“My sisters did not die in vain,” she said.
“They are the reason I tell this story”.
But Sarah also carried another pain, the pain of being forgotten.
For decades, commemorative events for the bombing focused on the four girls who were killed.
Sarah, who carried pieces of glass in her body for life, >> >> who permanently lost sight in one eye, who witnessed her sister’s final moments, was often not invited.
>> >> She became the fifth girl, a title that was both a recognition and a reminder that she always stood behind.
In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of the bombing, Sarah publicly called on the state of Alabama to provide official compensation for what she had been through.
She said she had never received an official apology from the state, never received medical compensation for the left eye she lost, never received acknowledgement that she, too, was a victim.
“What more do they want from us?” she asked.
That question has still not been fully answered.
But the legacy of the bombing reaches far beyond the four girls, far beyond Sarah, far beyond the courtroom.
It changed the entire United States.
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing was one of the most direct catalysts for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Before the explosion, President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Bill was stuck in Congress, obstructed by Southern lawmakers.
After the explosion and after Kennedy’s assassination that November, the wave of national outrage created enough political pressure to push the bill through.
President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law on July 2nd, 1964, banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, or sex.
>> >> In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed as well.
Reverend Arthur Price Jr.
of the 16th Street Baptist Church later said, “People were angry >> >> and the anger turned into action.
Action turned into change.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed.
In 1965, the Voting Rights Act was passed.
That law was written in the blood of children”.
President Barack Obama, in a written statement, called September 15th, 1963 a horrific day for the city and the country, but said it moved Americans across the country to stand up for equality and expanded support for a movement that ultimately led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Attorney General Eric Holder called the girls’ deaths a pivotal and tragic moment in American history.
The 16th Street Baptist Church today remains an active church.
It is also a National Historic Landmark.
Across from the church, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which opened in 1992, displays the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the city.
Outside the museum, the Four Spirits statue stands in memory of the four girls.
The sculpture depicts the four girls in motion, alive, not dying.
That was a deliberate choice by the artist to remember them as they lived, not as they died.
At the 50th anniversary commemoration in September 2013, the bells of the 16th Street Baptist Church rang four times, one for Addie Mae, one for Cynthia, one for Carol, one for Denise.
In 1997, director Spike Lee released the documentary Four Little Girls, which retold the story of the bombing through the accounts of families and survivors.
The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.
It brought the four girls’ faces to a new generation of Americans, people born after the bombing, who had never heard the names Addie Mae Collins or Denise McNair.
The legal legacy echoes far beyond Birmingham as well.
The convictions of Blanton and Cherry, along with the conviction of Beckwith in Mississippi, proved that cold cases from the Civil Rights era could be solved, that time does not protect killers, that witnesses can speak up after decades of silence, and that 21st century juries are willing to look back at the crimes of the 20th century and deliver a just verdict.
The US Congress passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act, creating a formal federal framework to identify, investigate, and prosecute cold cases from the Civil Rights era.
Dozens of cases were reviewed.
That law is a direct descendant of the verdicts in Birmingham and Jackson, proof that late justice can still create systemic change.
On the morning of Sunday, September 15th, 1963, Denise McNair asked Addie Mae Collins to tie the sash on her dress in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
The bow was never finished.
Four girls died.
A fifth girl survived with glass in her eye for the rest of her life.
The FBI knew who planted the bomb, but chose silence.
A 29-year-old attorney general refused to let the case die.
A prosecutor turned a childhood obsession into a mission.
The killer’s own wife and son took the witness stand and told the truth.
And 39 years after that morning, 12 jurors said what should have been said in 1963, >> >> guilty.
This is Cold Case Reopened.
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