BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Some of the evidence lay buried in FBI wiretaps ordered sealed by former Director J. Edgar Hoover himself.
Other evidence against two ex-Ku Klux Klansmen, prosecutors say, remained behind the sealed lips of relatives too scared to talk.
But now--more than 37 years after four black girls were killed in a dynamite bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church--those seals have been broken. And a team of state and federal attorneys is poised to shed light on one of the darkest chapters in U.S. civil rights history.
Jury selection begins Monday in the trial of Thomas E. Blanton Jr., 62, who along with Bobby Frank Cherry, 71, faces four counts of first-degree murder. They were to be tried together, but Circuit Judge James Garrett on Tuesday cited "medical reasons" for postponing Cherry's trial indefinitely.
In interviews, pretrial motions and court hearings, prosecutors have revealed an array of evidence that includes hours of recordings of the defendants' conversations after the 1963 bombing--picked up by telephone wiretaps and a bug placed behind a kitchen sink. There is also the testimony from an ex-wife, an estranged son and a former Klansman who for years was a paid FBI informant.
If convicted, Blanton and Cherry could face life in prison. Each says he is not guilty.
"I ain't never wanted to bomb nothing," Cherry said after he was arrested last spring.
Even though the FBI had named the men as prime suspects within weeks of the bombing, not everyone is happy about bringing them to trial now--especially here in Birmingham, an industrial capital of the South that has worked to reinvent itself since Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed it the most segregated big city in the nation.
"There are some whites who feel this just inflames old wounds," said Richard Arrington Jr., who in 1979 became the city's first black mayor. "But with the suspects out there and never brought to trial, this case never goes away. It continues to be a negative cloud over the city."
Indeed, the trial promises to confront Birmingham and the South with a painful picture of its violent past. As President Kennedy anguished in 1963 over federal intervention, newly elected Gov. George C. Wallace ordered National Guard troops to bar black students from entering the public schools.
