We Still Remember The 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing!

We will never forget about the four girls who lost their lives in a horrible act of terrorism.
(Clockwise from top left, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair)

We mark 50 years of a horrible tragedy. The 16th Street Baptist Church in the city of Birmingham, Alabama is a national historic site. The site was ground zero of a horrible incident. Four innocent girls died in an act of terror.

After the March on Washington, many racial extremists were not happy about the meddling of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the NAACP, and President John F. Kennedy.

They wanted to send a message to those who stood in the way of Jim Crow.

Two men who had ties to the Ku Klux Klan set a bomb around the side of the 16th Street Baptist Church.

The bomb went off during a nice Sunday in September.

It would kill four young girls. Girls who were doing what Americans would do on Sunday mornings, attend church. Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14), were killed.

Following the tragic event, white strangers visited the grieving families to express their sorrow. At the funeral for three of the girls (one family preferred a separate, private funeral), Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about life being "as hard as crucible steel." More than 8,000 mourners, including 800 clergymen of all races, attended the service. No city officials attended.

The bombing continued to increase worldwide sympathy for the civil rights cause. On July 2, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, ensuring equal rights of African Americans before the law.

The 16th Street Baptist Church is a national historic site.

These young girls futures were cut short by a bunch of extremists.

The United Klan of America, a breakaway group that associated with the Klan in the past had four men involved in it. The Klan was at it peak of strength during the 1950s all the way to the mid 1970s.

Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton, Herman Frank Cash, and Robert Chambliss were the individuals involved in planting a box of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the church, near the basement.

Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Birmingham was a violent city and was nicknamed “Bombingham”, because the city had experienced more than 50 bombings in black institutions and homes since World War I.

A witness identified Robert Chambliss,  as the man who placed the bomb under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested but only charged with possessing a box of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit.

Chambliss received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite.

At the time, no federal charges were filed on Chambliss.

All that would change when the FBI finally took interest into the case. FBI investigations gathered evidence pointing to four suspects: Robert Chambliss, Thomas E. Blanton Jr, Herman Cash, and Bobby Frank Cherry. According to a later report from the Bureau, “By 1965, we had serious suspects—namely, Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, and Thomas E. Blanton, Jr., were KKK members. Most of them claimed they've renounced their past and were innocent in the incident.

Witnesses were reluctant to talk out of fear for retaliation and physical evidence was lacking. Also, at that time, information from our surveillances was not admissible in court. As a result, no federal charges were filed in the ’60s.”

Although Chambliss was convicted on an explosives charge, no convictions were obtained in the 1960s for the killings.

Alabama Attorney General William Baxley reopened the investigation after he took office in 1971, requesting evidence from the FBI and building trust with key witnesses who had been reluctant to testify in the first trial. The prosecutor had been a student at the University of Alabama when he heard about the bombing in 1963.

“I wanted to do something, but I didn’t know what.”

Chambliss was indicted in the murder of all four girls, tried and convicted of the first-degree murder of Denise McNair, and sentenced to life in prison. He died eight years later in prison.

Thomas E. Blanton, Jr. was tried in 2001 and found guilty at age 62 of four counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Herman Cash died in 1994 without having been charged. Bobby Frank Cherry, also a former Klansman, was indicted in 2001 along with Blanton. Judge James Garrett of Jefferson County Circuit Court ruled "that Mr. Cherry's trial would be delayed indefinitely because a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation concluded that he was mentally incompetent.”

He was later convicted in 2002, sentenced to life in prison, and died in 2004

Sarah Collins, the sister of Addie Mae would survive the bombing and become a civil rights leader and speaker.

A tragedy that sparked the Civil Rights movement.

The president, Congress and many Civil Rights leaders show solidarity on this day.

We here at Journal de la Reyna will never forget the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

We send our condolences to the families of those innocent young girls.