ATLANTA — Decades after they were named as suspects, two former Ku Klux Klansmen have been charged with murder in the infamous 1963 bombing of a black Birmingham, Ala., church, one of the most hideous crimes of the civil rights era.
Nearly 37 years have passed since a dynamite bomb rocked the landmark 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four young girls in a basement lounge. Over time, probes have been opened and dropped then reopened, one man was arrested and convicted, but well-known suspects remained at large.
Now, an Alabama grand jury has indicted 62-year-old Thomas Blanton Jr. of Birmingham and 69-year-old Bobby Frank Cherry of Mabank, Texas. Both men surrendered early Wednesday at the Jefferson County Sheriff's Department in Birmingham. They were charged with eight counts of murder--two counts for each victim--and held without bond.
The two men are thought to be the last living suspects in the bombing, a seminal event in the nation's bloody struggle for equality and one in a series of racially motivated killings recently revisited. "This bombing was the watershed moment of the civil rights movement," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, praising the arrests. "In almost every way, it was the moment the conscience of white America-- which had been asleep a very long time--awoke."
Jefferson County Dist. Atty. David Barber wouldn't say what new evidence led to the indictments that were so long in the making. A federal grand jury has been hearing evidence since U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno reopened the case in 1997. Barber also wouldn't say why, after a federal grand jury heard the evidence, it was a state grand jury that handed up the indictments. (The state grand jury heard evidence Monday and Tuesday, before indicting the men Tuesday afternoon.)
Explaining, Barber said, would require disclosing key pieces of evidence.
David Luker, a Birmingham lawyer representing Blanton, said his client will plead innocent. "Absolutely," Luker said. "He's maintained his innocence for 37 years."
It wasn't immediately clear who would represent Cherry.
Newspaper accounts of the grand jury proceedings have shown a case gradually building, while cracks formed in the alibis of the men. "You need one good alibi," said Frank Sikora, a retired Birmingham newspaper reporter and author of a book about the bombing, "Until Justice Rolls Down." "And [Blanton] had five. He kept changing them."
