Thursday nights were busy under Highway 280’s Cahaba River Bridge, on the outskirts of the city of Birmingham.
The Cahaba River is a small, beautiful estuary that boasts one of the most diverse ecosystems in the country. But to this day, it’s bleak down there under 280 at night. The river laps noisily onto the scrappy grassed banks as cars rumble across the bridge above. There is a sense of menace as any movement in the immediate area echoes. The squelch of approaching footsteps through the mud is particularly unsettling.
Back in the sixties, even kids knew snippets about the strange and dangerous people who’d gather there. They were like the trolls of children’s storybooks in many imaginations, brutish bogeymen doing all manner of unspeakable things right at the doorstep of civilization.
Turns out that was just about right.
With Friday and Saturday nights reserved for chasing women, harassing blacks, and maybe taking in a movie, Thursdays under the bridge were an opportunity for some of the Klan’s most abhorrent to break out the bourbon, moonshine, and hateful rants.
It was a safe place for open discussion, as most of the men correctly believed their homes and cars to be bugged by the FBI. The Klan had historically operated with relative freedom in Birmingham, as many powerful elements in the local and state police forces were KKK sympathizers. But the Feds, along with their wiretaps and “bugs,” were a source of constant concern.
A relentless Klan campaign to terrorize blacks (and to a lesser extent Jews and Catholics) in Birmingham had gone on for decades and accelerated in the early sixties after federal government intervention and court rulings intensified the push to racially integrate schools and dismantle the vestiges of institutional segregation.
The frequent bombings in black Birmingham neighborhoods had shone a national spotlight on the city. The law at the time allowed the FBI and other federal organizations to use wires to listen for potential violent threats with a view to thwarting nefarious plots. Use of the recordings as evidence in a court of law, however, was debatable.
Under the bridge, the Klansmen were free to speculate and plan. And there was much to discuss as fall descended on Birmingham in 1963. Governor Wallace was blowing hard in opposition to desegregation. The same week black kids were poised to attend formerly white schools for the first time in Birmingham, he’d told the New York Times that to stop integration, Alabama needed “a few first-class funerals.”
Wallace’s words were divisive and inflammatory, but many white supremacists were angry that he seemed unable to curtail the federal government’s initiatives to desegregate the South.
In June, the Governor’s so-called Stand in the Schoolhouse Door to block the entry of two African-American students to the University of Alabama had proved ineffective and, if anything, sparked federal authorities into action, with JFK addressing the nation hours later to outline what would later become legislation as the Civil Rights Act.
The Klan and their sympathizers increasingly believed it was time they took matters into their own hands. Indeed, soon after watching the Kennedy address on television, Mississippi civil rights activist Medgar Evers was fatally shot on the front porch of his Jackson home by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith.
Prominent among the Birmingham group of incensed Klansmen was Robert Chambliss, also known as “Dynamite Bob,” who was responsible for a large proportion of the explosive destruction around Birmingham. His primary target was Dynamite Hill, the old Fountain Heights area. Onetime Klan leader Charles Pearson, a grocer, used to live in the neighborhood. Pearson had paid his most violent friends in perishable goods to cause havoc in response to the neighborhood’s evolution from a white enclave to a home to many black families.
The men under the bridge called themselves the Cahaba River Bridge Boys and were associated with a special local Klan pod, Eastview Klavern #13. Believing the larger Klan organization was not doing enough to stem civil rights progress, they perceived themselves as storm troopers for the white supremacist cause and advocated the use of extreme violence.
In the book Long Time Coming, Petric Smith (formerly Elizabeth H. Cobbs, Chambliss’s niece by marriage) details the “to death” secrecy and loyalty among the group’s members and maps some of their connections around the city.
The author identifies some of the core group as Chambliss, Troy Ingram, Thomas “Pops” Blanton and his son Tommy, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Cash and his brother Jack, Charles Cagle, and John Wesley “Nigger” Hall. Law enforcement documents from the period pinpoint Hubert Page, a Klansman with extensive political connections, as the group’s leader.
They were unified by their commitment to carnage and moved to secretive action by what Chambliss and others perceived to be the wider Klan community going “soft.”
The spot under the bridge was their boozing sanctuary. At other times, they would meet in secret at members’ homes or gather at the Modern Sign Company shop in downtown Birmingham, owned by sympathizer Merle Snow.
The Modern Sign Shop churned out Confederate flags, banners, and other symbols of Southern white anger and hate, many of which adorned Chevys and Fords cruising Birmingham streets.
The hardcore trolls from under the Cahaba River Bridge plotted random acts of violence to inflict on the black community, including “missionary work” of conspicuous beatings, to send a message.
These were the radical fringe dwellers of an extremist movement. They didn’t need an invitation to carry out despicable acts, but with the school year about to commence, howls of protest reached a fevered pitch as white school districts throughout the region prepared to integrate racially.
If Wallace, Connor, and other politicians couldn’t do anything, it was up to the Cahaba River Bridge Boys. They felt they had a mandate.
“Just you wait until Sunday morning,” one of the Boys sneered under his breath, hinting at what was to come. The Klansmen, often full of piss and vinegar, couldn’t help incriminating themselves, implying in earshot of family that an earth-shattering event would rectify the creep of integration.
To the Klansmen of Eastview #13 the white community had been soft on segregation, and now the reality was setting in that their kids would be going to school with “niggers.”
Friday night, September 13, marked the end of a momentous week. Blacks had taken their kids into white schools for the first time, and whites throughout Birmingham were angry. The enmity reached a fever pitch at the Modern Sign Shop. Chambliss was there, likely making final adjustments to the bomb he’d been building, perhaps at Troy Ingram’s house. The pair were said to be in a constant battle to demonstrate who built the better explosive devices. At some stage, Tom Blanton came by, and former munitions expert Bobby Frank Cherry added his support and expertise to the special project.
Few outsiders were tolerated at such gatherings, and all were bound by the “kiss of death”—the threat of Klan execution should any word of their business leak out.
This bomb would be a Dynamite Bob masterpiece—much larger than the couple of sticks of dynamite used in the past to attack black churches and residences of prominent African Americans. It was rumored that Chambliss had learned to use a fishing bobber and wire as part of a drip method employing a bucket of water as an ignition device, a significant technological advance.
Transporting the bomb, especially because it had a dozen or so sticks of dynamite, would be a challenge, but it would all fit into a single satchel, and the destination, the most famous black church in Birmingham, was only a few blocks away from the sign shop. They’d made the run a few weeks earlier, and all had gone according to plan until a civil defense volunteer shone his headlights in the direction of the car. The Klansmen would be taking extra care this time to avoid detection.
Alibis were constructed, some in coordination with sympathetic cops, friends, lovers, and acquaintances, and a series of distractions around the city in the quiet hours of late Saturday night and early Sunday morning were planned.
On the night of September 14, there was a barrage of phone calls to Chambliss’s home, so many that his wife and her sister knew that something was up. Even those not within the inner sanctum seemed to know an attack was imminent, as did a few cops with friendly connections in the KKK. Klansmen and their associates spread throughout Birmingham, making sure they were “seen” in order to account for their whereabouts.
Finally, a tense quiet descended on the city.
In the sweetly cool early morning hours of Sunday, September 15, one witness could barely believe his eyes as a parade of maybe twenty Chevys and Fords, adorned with Confederate flags, rumbled through downtown and into the black business district around 16th Street Baptist Church. They disappeared quickly.
Earlier in the night, there had been information that a group of blacks armed with shotguns was motoring toward the city. There was nothing to that, but not long after the conspicuous Confederate caravan rolled by, a call came into police headquarters warning that a bomb had been planted at the Downtowner Holiday Inn and would detonate at 3:30 a.m. Police were redirected from patrols to check it out, but there was no sign of any device.
Meanwhile, the Cahaba River Bridge Boys had picked up the bomb, loading it into Tom Blanton’s 1957 white-on-blue Chevy. The car’s guttural purr in the inky darkness didn’t seem to disturb anyone around the church.
Pulling up in front of Poole’s Funeral Chapel at the rear of 16th Street Baptist Church, they acted with stealth, mindful of attracting attention. The lights of a passing car came straight at them briefly, but it moved on without stopping.
The weeds and brush underneath the bottom step of the outside stairwell that ran to the back of the main sanctuary on the 16th Street side of the church, just below the magnificent stained-glass window of Christ, offered a perfect location to do the most damage. They placed the bomb there and set it.
It was dark at the side of the building; you could hardly see a few feet in front of you.
With the bomb secured in place, the conspirators hightailed it; the only glitch, a cop in a patrol car spotted them speeding through Ensley and gave chase. Knowing the streets in the area, though, they easily left him behind.
As the sun rose at 6:20 on September 15, 1963, an unseasonably mild though slightly cloudy morning, families throughout the city and its suburbs prepared for a day of worship.
Reverend John Cross, assisted by associate ministers Herbert E. Oden and M. A. Stollenwerck, usually brought the message to the congregation at the 16th Street Baptist Church. This Sunday’s 11:00 a.m. gathering would be a special “Youth Worship Service,” featuring the active involvement of many young churchgoers. The Sunday School lesson was entitled “A Love That Forgives.”
Reverend Cross felt it an appropriate time to focus his young flock on matters of the soul and spirit after the especially tumultuous spring and summer. He had mixed feelings about the church being a staging point for earlier protests and the children being used in the campaign, though he conceded that much good had come of it.
The Children’s Crusade marches had started from the church, and it had been used as a gathering place for those planning the protests. The dramatic photos of youths being sprayed by authorities with fire hoses and set upon by police dogs had been taken across the road in and around Kelly Ingram Park and sent all around the world by the news media.
Founded in 1873, 16th Street was the oldest and most prestigious black Baptist church in the city. Located on the same site since 1880, it underwent modifications until completion in 1911. Its unique Romanesque and Byzantine design and construction cost $26,000.
The state’s only black architect, Wallace Rayfield, had designed the building. The contractor was T. C. Windham, one of the few African Americans with such a prominent job at the time.
Over the years, national black leaders and civil rights activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Robeson, Ralph Bunche, and Dick Gregory had lectured from the pulpit.
Six mass meetings of more than a thousand black protesters and twelve additional workshops to instruct participants how to behave in community marches and sit-ins had been held at the church over the spring and summer. Additionally, there had been weekly meetings encouraging and promoting the urgency of voting rights for the adults.
16th Street’s role had made it a target for those who hated the very idea of civil rights.
One day in June, church clerk Myrtle Buycks listened to what sounded like an elderly man on the other end of a call: “This is the KKK. Your church will be bombed tonight,” he said.
On Sunday, September 8, church secretary Mabel Shorter received an eerie call from a man who also identified himself as a member of the Klan, telling her the church would be bombed that night. Intimidating calls had also been received at the home of Reverend Cross, whose daughter took one from a woman warning that the church would be blown up.
Although no devices were ever found, Cross had exercised caution, canceling church activities in some cases.
It was full steam ahead on Sunday, September 15, however. The marquee outside the church announced the start of a series of youth services. The church and the youth, both prominent symbols of the movement, were coming together again.
Right on time at 7:00 a.m., janitor Willie Green, a former railroad man, reported to work to clean, sweep, and mop the building. Reverend Cross got there at 8:00, about thirty minutes ahead of Eva Jones, a Sunday School teacher. A few minutes later, secretary Shorter arrived.
Green took his 9:00 a.m. break, checking the main clock in the church to make sure it was synchronized with his watch before heading across the street to the Silver Sands Restaurant for a morning cup of coffee. By that time, in the course of doing his job, he probably would have been one of a few people to trudge up and down the outside stairs at the rear of the church that morning.
There were only six people in the café, including its workers. One of them, waitress Barbara Poellnitz, while taking the order from Green and a couple of other patrons, eyeballed a blue or green car speeding by with a huge rebel flag flapping from the antenna. This is a bad omen, she thought to herself.
At 9:20 a.m. William Grier was driving to church with his wife Mamie in their new blue-and-white Buick Electra. On approach, they noticed a dark green 1955 to 1957 Chevrolet with a large Confederate flag flying from its rear antenna. There appeared to be a single person in the car, the driver, a white man around forty years old. He was cruising around the church. A foreboding gripped them.
Meanwhile, well-dressed families started streaming toward the church for adult and junior Sunday School classes. Mothers had taken special care to groom their children on this special day.
Most early arrivals were there for Sunday School. Children, usually more than two dozen of them, would head to the basement area, where they would break into groups in small rooms off the main assembly area. The girls would often preen for the service in a “ladies’ lounge” in the northeastern corner of the basement.
The church had grown so much in recent years that the adult Sunday School classes had to meet in various locations throughout the building. Most adults would bypass the basement and meander up the massive stairs in the front of the building that led directly to the sanctuary.
Claude and Gertrude Wesley planned to make the short trek from their home at 11th Avenue North with their beloved Cynthia Morris, a fourteen-year-old who had come into their life when she was only six. Cynthia was from a large family with a single mother who was having difficulty raising her children, and a social worker had persuaded Mrs. Morris to allow Cynthia to live with the Wesleys, who had no children of their own.
Pushed academically by Mrs. Wesley, a teacher and later a principal at Lewis Elementary, Cynthia played the violin, was in the school band, and sang in the church choir. Noted for her vibrancy and sense of humor, she loved animals and planned to be a veterinarian. She was “a blessing from God,” according to the Wesleys.
On Saturday night, Cynthia had been reading news of the death of a baby and was motivated to ask why God would take home such an innocent child. Mrs. Wesley replied that God sometimes took buds that would bloom in his heavenly garden.
Cynthia was eager to arrive for her Sunday School class that morning, so Claude Wesley dropped her at the front of the church at 9:30 before parking several blocks away and heading off to take care of some personal business, including getting a shoeshine, before the 11:00 a.m. service.
Cynthia’s friend Carole Robertson was also dropped off in front of the church by her father. She was especially excited about the prospect of being an usher for the special service.
The fourteen-year-old—Alvin and Alpha Robertson’s third child—was, like sister Diane and brother Alvin Jr., a standout in most everything she did. An honor roll student, she entered Parker High School in 1962, where she sang and played clarinet in the band. A Brownie who had graduated to the Girl Scouts, Carole also joined Jack and Jill of America, a group formed to build leaders among young blacks.
Addie Mae Collins didn’t have the benefit of a car ride that day. She was a little disheveled on arrival, having used a pretty purse as a makeshift football for a fun scrimmage with her sisters on the walk to the church.
The fourteen-year-old was the seventh of Oscar and Alice Collins’s eight children and was considered the peacemaker in the family. An eighth grader at Hill Elementary School, she played baseball and was quite the pitcher, blessed with a baffling underhand motion.
Addie Mae sang in the church choir and the night before had starched her white dress and pressed and curled her hair so she would look her best. But the football game with younger sister Sarah and older sibling Janie that broke out on her walk to 16th Street meant Addie Mae needed a touch-up if she was to look her best as an usher at the special service.
The Collins girls arrived a little after 10:00, a bit late for Sunday School. Janie informed her younger sisters they needed to hurry into the ladies’ lounge to make sure they looked appropriate.
Denise McNair was also running a little late and wanted her father to drop her off on his way to his church, St. Paul’s Lutheran. But her dad, Chris, was pressed for time.
“Why can’t you wait for me?” she asked her daddy, who explained he had duties as St. Paul’s Sunday School superintendent.
“Okay Daddy, go ahead,” she said. A short time later she hugged her dog Whitey and joined her mother, Maxine, for the drive to 16th Street.
Arriving at 9:55, as the cool, dry day slowly seemed to be transforming into something less desirable under increasingly overcast skies, Maxine parked near the parsonage on 5th Avenue. The two parted at the steps outside the church as Denise went downstairs while her mother climbed the stairs to attend her adult class in the choir loft, almost directly above the ladies’ lounge.
A few minutes after reaching her Sunday School class, Denise asked permission from her teacher, Clevon Phillips, to go to the ladies’ lounge. Two of the Collins sisters—Addie Mae and Sarah—were already there, along with Cynthia Morris Wesley and Carole Robertson.
Janie Collins and Marsha Stollenwerck were leaving as Denise arrived. Walking toward them to tell the young ladies to return to their class was Bernadine Mathews, fifteen, sent on this mission by her teacher.
Admonishing the girls to hurry up and put on their robes so they could help usher, Bernadine heard Cynthia say, “I just have to push my hair up one more time, and I’ll be ready.”
Before closing the door, Bernadine responded, “Cynthia, children who don’t obey the Lord live only half as long.” She then turned and began to walk back to her classroom.
The explosion was heard miles away. “The whole world started shaking. It sounded like it, felt like it,” recalled Reverend Cross, who had been enjoying a little pre-service solitude on a pew in the sanctuary at that minute, 10:22 a.m., when the clock in the sanctuary stopped and time stood still.
Pieces of brick, glass, concrete, dust, dirt, and debris fell through the windows of the church into the sanctuary. Flying debris cut many, and scores of worshippers were disoriented by the explosion and devastation around them. Smoke accompanied by a fetid odor swept through the building.
As the crushing sound of the blast subsided, the rising cacophony was a sickening blend of screams for help and pain from children, mothers, and fathers. Reverend Cross quickly ushered the ninety or so members in the main church area out of the building for fear it would buckle.
While the adult Sunday School classes exited from the main entrance, the pastor checked to see if the basement, where the children’s class had been due to conclude at 10:30 a.m., had been cleared. There had been at least two dozen kids and teachers in the rooms below the main worship area.
It appeared most of the children in the basement had escaped the building, though some were cut, screaming as they searched for parents outside. Many managed to get out unharmed, ushered to safety by their teachers after lying on the floor under tables to protect themselves from falling ceiling fragments.
Working his way outside, Reverend Cross observed a huge hole where the window to the ladies’ lounge had been located. The outside stairs next to that window had been reduced to rubble, and there was a crater descending about eighteen inches into the church’s concrete foundation. His heart sank as he realized it was likely someone would have been in the now obliterated lounge at the time of the explosion.
It also occurred to Reverend Cross that another explosion was a possibility. It gave him a moment’s pause before he quickly made the decision to enter the devastated area through the gaping hole in the side of the church.
Joined by a few worshippers, he tossed aside debris, choked on dust, and struggled to make out anything still intact. Then they all saw it. A body, and another, and … four dead and disfigured girls next to each other as if stacked neatly in a row. Complete, overwhelming horror was postponed, however, as the men heard moans. Amid the rubble was Sarah Collins, alive but with terrible injuries, including a shattered eye; her face had been pierced by about two dozen shards of glass.
Placed in an ambulance, Sarah sobbed and screamed uncontrollably: “Addie … Addie!”
Chris McNair had heard the explosion from St. Paul’s. He was familiar with that sound and feared its consequences, knowing the direction it came from. Seeing the plume of smoke in the distance, he raced toward 16th Street.
On arrival, he instinctively snapped a single photo with his ever-present camera, before the sounds of distress and panic alerted him to the likelihood that the damage that morning was not restricted to the church building that he had just photographed.
Maxine McNair’s screams were primal. She couldn’t find Denise. Her father, M.W. Pippin, who owned the laundromat across 16th Street, having recognized Niecie’s leather shoes amid the carnage, broke the news to her.
Dr. Joseph Donald Jr. was the physician on duty at Hillman Hospital (now UAB Medical Center) on Birmingham’s Southside when the ambulances arrived with victims. In the end, there were more than twenty injured and the four girls who were pronounced dead on arrival.
Birmingham Coroner J. O. Butler and his deputy, W. L. Allen, had the gruesome task of photographing and identifying the deceased. The negatives were enlarged by the Birmingham police photographer, Don Sharp, and forwarded immediately to the Office of U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. As Coroner, Dr. Butler was accustomed to dealing with the bodies of homicide victims, but on this day, September 15, 1963, he had the especially grim duty of leading parents into a makeshift morgue to view the remains of their little girls.
Fourteen-year-olds Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, and Cynthia Morris Wesley and eleven-year-old Carol Denise McNair, all bursting with life, radiant in their Sunday best and filled to the brim with promise earlier that morning, were dead from massive head injuries. Their bodies were horribly burned. Cynthia was only immediately identifiable by her clothes and shoes.
The nightmare image that remains with Chris McNair, now in his ninety-third year, is of his lifeless Niecie with a piece of mortar still piercing her skull.
The face of Jesus was blown off. Somewhat remarkably, the explosion that destroyed walls, badly damaged buildings in the vicinity, and crushed nearby cars left an image of Christ in a stained-glass window on the 16th Street side of the church intact, except for the face.
The force of the explosion was such that it was surprising anything was left standing in the immediate area and that the death toll wasn’t drastically higher. That was, of course, no consolation to anyone, especially Reverend Cross, who would blame himself for the girls’ deaths for the rest of his life.
Reverend Cross found it easier to forgive the bombers than he did himself for allowing his church to be used as the assembly point for the spring and summer’s protest action, believing it made 16th Street and the children targets for evil. Decades after the attack I watched this fine man repeatedly beat himself up over it. It was heart-wrenching.
Most everyone immediately suspected that the Klan was the culprit. A line had been crossed, shifting the race relations paradigm forever. There had been Klan atrocities for as long as anyone could remember, but usually each event would briefly propel all the pieces of the racism puzzle into the air only to have them come down pretty much where they had been before.
Not this time, however. The bombing and the death of the girls had the capacity to either embolden or break the black community and certainly shook some moderate whites from their complacent Southern stupor. The shock waves rippled through the nation as horrified people everywhere asked how such a thing could happen in the United States.
Politicians in the nation’s capital, procrastinating over the proposed civil rights legislation introduced in the wake of the children’s marches, faced a new ugly reality.
With the world’s attention on Birmingham, what would quickly become a huge, unwieldy, multi-agency investigation was launched.
The Birmingham police force, regardless of the intent of scores of honest cops, was littered with Klan sympathizers who not only had the capacity to hamper inquiries about the bombing but quite possibly had insider knowledge of the crime.
The ranks of the state authority, too, were poisoned by white supremacists and men whose primary allegiance was to George Wallace and a segregated way of life. Prominent among them was Alabama Department of Safety Director Al Lingo.
FBI agents, while certainly not untouchable, were less wedded to the mores of the South. In fact, J. Edgar Hoover, the agency’s iron-willed boss, used to insist on stationing G-men in areas where they had no real roots. With their expert resources and personnel, the Feds were the best chance to uncover evidence in Birmingham that could be used effectively in a court of law. Their presence, however, would infuriate local authorities.
Some potential conflicts between city, state, and federal authorities were bypassed when President Kennedy quickly anointed the FBI with control of the investigation. But the immediate challenge of stopping the city from descending into civil unrest and potentially going up in flames rested with local authorities.
In the aftermath, there was a swift eruption of violent protest, and by the end of that terrible day, further fatal violence. Enraged African Americans in and around the city threw rocks at police and bystanders. Passersby were attacked, cars overturned, and several abandoned buildings near the church damaged. One white boy, sixteen-year-old Dennis Robertson, was heading home from work at the farmers market when he was struck by a rock to the face, putting him in a coma for several days.
In the suburbs, whites carried on as normal. The segregationists gathered to have group tantrums about integrating schools and denounce the influence of outsiders and the federal government.
Around the church, a crowd of black folks quickly gathered. Most were there to assist, but many could not contain their anger when they learned of the children’s deaths. A riot threatened to break out as police and other officials converged on the scene.
Reverend Cross likely saved a few lives when he pleaded for calm. At one point he grabbed a bullhorn from James Lay, a postal worker and member of the volunteer team that tried to protect the homes and churches of the civil rights leaders from bombers.
Lay, one of the first on the scene to help that day, would play a crucial—though reluctant—role in the investigation and prosecution of the case until he died thirty-eight years later.
Reverend Cross, seemingly powerless to stop the protests, stood surrounded by rubble outside the church. Battling an overwhelming, acrid odor and with ghastly images of disfigured dead girls planted in his head, he used the bullhorn to beseech the crowd for calm, offering some of the prayers that would have been used in the Sunday School lesson earlier that morning: “A Love That Forgives.”
In neighborhoods around the city, people tumbled into the streets to talk and comfort one another. But this was Birmingham. The Chevys with rebel flags continued to prowl the suburbs, their symbolic ammunition more repellant than ever, and at least one community went ahead with a plan for a mass rally to protest school integration.
A bunch of white kids drove by sixteen-year-old African American Johnny Robinson and his friends, who were hanging out near 26th Street. Soda pop bottles and racial slurs spewed out of the Confederate flag–emblazoned car, witnesses said. The teens hurled abuse and rocks in response.
One projectile struck an unintended target, a police cruiser. In the backseat was Officer Jack Parker with a shotgun. The kids scattered. As they ran away, one, perhaps two shotgun blasts erupted. Johnny Robinson was shot in the back and killed.
The cops, who had blocked the alley and the obvious escape route, suggested it was an accident—maybe the police car had hit a bump, and Officer Parker’s shotgun went off—or maybe they had stopped too suddenly.
A more credible account came from other witnesses, who said police deliberately shot twice without any verbal warning and hit the fleeing, unarmed teenager, who had done nothing to the officers except run from them.
An inquiry was held, and both a local and, later, federal grand jury found no reason to prosecute Parker. As several high-profile cases have shown again in recent years, taking action for “excessive force” incidents involving white officers and young black males, no matter how apparently clear-cut the case, is a special challenge. It was damn near impossible in 1963.
The same afternoon across town at the Dixie Speedway in suburban Midfield, several thousand white protesters, including many of the Klan’s most obnoxious, had gathered for a rally decrying the integration of West End High School.
Even though rally leader Reverend Ferrell Griswold canceled a planned march into the city, tension at the rally was high, anger immense. The federal government, as usual, was blamed for pushing unwanted change, and an effigy of Attorney General Kennedy was burned.
A couple of attendees, sixteen-year-olds Michael Lee Farley and Larry Joe Sims, no doubt fired up by the rally, went off to buy a rebel flag that they mounted on Michael’s red motorcycle.
Around the same time, African-American brothers Virgil and James Ware, unaware of the bombing downtown, hopped on James’s bicycle. Farley and Sims, apparently aware that white teen Dennis Robertson had been seriously injured in a rock-throwing incident earlier in the day, spotted the boys.
Thirteen-year-old Virgil was on top of the handlebars while his sixteen-year-old brother pedaled toward their home in Pratt City. As the red motorcycle, driven by Farley, drew close, Farley handed his .22 revolver to Sims.
Passing the kids on the bicycle, Sims fired. Bullets from the gun hit Virgil in the chest and cheek. The Sandusky Elementary School student was pronounced dead at 5:05 p.m.
Farley and Sims would ultimately confess. Sims told authorities that he was just trying to scare the boys. Both were prosecuted in juvenile court, but neither was sent to prison, and their suspended sentences carried only a two-year probation.
Grief and rage hung heavy in the air when Dr. King arrived in Birmingham that Sunday night.
Confrontations flared all over the city as the grieving families began the seemingly impossible task of finishing one day and contemplating starting another without their children.
Alpha and Alvin Robertson and their two remaining kids sought solace and strength from prayer, not only for their beloved Carole and the other girls but also for their assailants. They promptly decided that Reverend Cross should memorialize Carole at Alvin’s church, St. John’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, on Tuesday. Their daughter’s fellow choir members from 16th Street would sing hymns in her memory.
Dr. King and other movement leaders wanted to have a single, combined memorial for the four girls to ensure maximum attendance and media exposure to highlight the tragedy. The leaders met with each family, but even with Dr. King’s remarkable powers of persuasion, he could only convince three of the four families to participate. The Robertsons stuck with their plan for a separate memorial for Carole.
There has been speculation their decision was influenced by comments Dr. King made criticizing the “apathy” and “complacency” of black people in Alabama, suggesting it contributed to a mindset that made the bombing possible. However, in my dealings with Alpha, who became a close friend years later and a person I admired greatly, that notion was never discussed. She told me pointedly the funeral arrangement was a decision made very soon after Carole’s death and the family simply preferred not to change it.
Some bombing suspects were identified within twenty-four hours. Everyone quickly recognized the Klan was the likely culprit, and before long evidence started pointing at a group of the KKK’s most violent, who had a long history of terrorism in Birmingham.
A consensus was forming that, after years of terrorizing black communities in the city, the Klan had gone several steps too far. The city’s new mayor, Albert Boutwell, broke down and cried in reaction to the horror and vowed to get “the few” responsible. But a young lawyer, disgusted by the bombing and the destructive culture of accusation, denial, and venality, let Birmingham know the blame should be widely spread.
In a speech of brilliance and bravery on par with the best of the civil rights era, Charles Morgan Jr. homed in on broad truths about the bombing, the murders, and the South, so much of which we still avoid facing today.
On Monday, September 16, Morgan addressed a lunch meeting of the city’s white establishment, the Birmingham Young Men’s Business Club, at the Redmont Hotel. He didn’t need to focus on the Klan. Morgan’s righteous attention was on his own people, white moderates who had done nothing to change the oppression of their black neighbors and had perpetuated an apartheid-like culture generation after generation by encouraging or tolerating blatant racial and social injustice.
Morgan was brilliantly indelicate in laying responsibility for the catastrophe at the feet of the people he was looking in the eye at that moment—the people who lived “in a leaderless city where no one accepts responsibility, where everybody wants to blame everybody else.”
“Who did it?” he asked.
The “who” is every little individual who talks about the “niggers” and spreads the seeds of his hate to his neighbor and his son. The jokester, the crude oaf whose racial jokes rock the party with laughter. The “who” is every governor who ever shouted for lawlessness and became a law violator. It is every senator and every representative who in the halls of Congress stands and with mock humility tells the world that things back home aren’t really like they are. It is courts that move ever so slowly, and newspapers that timorously defend the law.
Morgan’s overriding message was that inaction over the city’s moral flaws—by people in a position to do something about them—had created and preserved the dysfunction that culminated in the church bombing.
“We all did it,” he told Birmingham’s most powerful whites.
Eventually, death threats against Morgan and his young family resulted in his relocation out of Alabama.
On Tuesday, about two thousand people attended Carole’s funeral, including an estimated one hundred white citizens.
Reverend Cross called it “the most painful eulogy I ever gave,” and the choir sobbed as much as sang in honor of their gentle friend. St. John’s minister, C. E. Thomas, beseeched the assembled mourners not to resort to violence. Standing by Carole’s flower-laden casket, he closed the memorial with a brief prayer: “Grant that her blood may be a symbol of Crispus Attucks,” a reference to the first person killed by the Redcoats at the Boston Massacre in 1770, an African American who became an anti-slavery icon.
The following day, in steamy September heat, Dr. King eulogized Cynthia, Denise, and Addie Mae at the Sixth Avenue Baptist Church.
No city officials were among the overflow crowd of an estimated seven thousand mourners, including hundreds of clergy, white and black, from a variety of religions.
“This afternoon we gather in the quiet of this sanctuary to pay our last tribute of respect to these beautiful children of God,” King told the mourners.
These children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.
And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. And so this afternoon in a real sense they have something to say to each of us in their death. They have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows.
They have something to say to every politician who has fed his constituents with the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. They have something to say to a federal government that has compromised with the undemocratic practices of southern Dixiecrats and the blatant hypocrisy of right-wing northern Republicans.
They have something to say to every Negro who has passively accepted the evil system of segregation and who has stood on the sidelines in a mighty struggle for justice. They say to each of us, black and white alike, that we must substitute courage for caution. They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. Their death says to us that we must work passionately and unrelentingly for the realization of the American dream.
And so my friends, they did not die in vain. God still has a way of wringing good out of evil. And history has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city.
That night after the funerals, Diane Nash, the brilliant civil rights strategist and activist, took an idea she had developed with her husband, James Bevel, to Dr. King and the SCLC leadership.
Nash, like most prominent figures in the movement, had been rocked to the core by the church bombing and the deaths of those children. Decisive action was required to initiate change in Alabama, and she enthusiastically proposed a nonviolent group march on the state capital of Montgomery.
In her passionate pitch, Nash advocated making it a nonviolent “siege”—a concept that King wasn’t quick to embrace. Eventually, however, the proposal would be acted on when King led the march from Selma to Montgomery, one of the pivotal events in civil rights history.
It’s not only with the benefit of hindsight that we can see how the challenge of carrying out a thorough, focused, and unbiased investigation of the bombing was a monumental task in Birmingham.
It was certainly obvious in 1963, when the President quickly appointed the FBI as lead investigative authority. Local law enforcement was a snake pit and despite the Feds’ apparent detachment from local influences, J. Edgar Hoover believed Dr. King to be a dangerous “communist” and was anything but sympathetic to the civil rights movement.
That has prompted speculation that Hoover and the FBI did not put sufficient effort into the investigation. What I found in my review of the files, some thirty-five years later, however, was just the opposite.
Granted, to this day, I don’t believe that Hoover went the extra yard because the victims were African-American girls, and he certainly didn’t demand a painstaking investigation to placate the civil rights movement, but he did care about himself and the FBI. He knew full well—indeed, he was on record as saying—that “the reputation of the Bureau” was at stake.
Hoover and the organization he shaped knew the danger the Klan presented to the wider community throughout the South and beyond. They were prolific bombers, thugs, and murderers, bound by secrecy, prompting extensive federal law enforcement efforts to infiltrate their ranks. The Bureau had a well-established practice of paying informants inside the KKK monthly sums for information.
The FBI chief duly directed as many resources at the bombing investigation as he could. And crucially, the focus and resolve of the forty or so agents assigned to the case—the “boots on the ground”—were extraordinary. Without their quality work, no resolution of the case would ever have been possible.
The investigation was conducted in a testing atmosphere. The local authorities didn’t want Feds there, and even though federal agents could approach Birmingham’s African-American population with more hope of securing cooperation than local cops could, they still met with resistance. Additionally, the Klan hated the Feds, viewing them as some sort of Yankee invading force when they descended on Birmingham in the days after the bombing.
Birmingham’s blacks at the time understandably had little faith in their police force. There were even whispers that Bull Connor and his goons had initiated the entire incident.
Before the Feds arrived, the vast number of honest local authorities tried to launch the investigation but faced the outrage of the community. Rocks and bricks were launched at official vehicles. A police car bore the brunt of the anger, and was pummeled with missiles on approach to the church. Richard Harris, of the Alabama Gas Company, was aboard.
Harris was there to evaluate if the explosion could have been the result of a natural gas leak rather than a bomb. He quickly dismissed the possibility, insisting there was zero chance any malfunctioning gas line could have been the culprit.
Other local authorities made swift, informed assessments of the scene, including Fire Marshal Aaron Rosenfeld. A bombing expert, no doubt with a lot of fieldwork experience in Birmingham, he evaluated the blast as having been caused by at least ten sticks of dynamite. He suggested that the bomb had been detonated by a fuse-type device, making it easy for an individual to quickly drop the package and depart.
The crater created by the explosion was five-and-a-half-feet wide and two-and-a-half deep. Digging through the debris of brick, stone, concrete, glass, mortar, plaster, and wood lath, firemen and police packaged significant items and samples to ship to the FBI labs. Yet even utilizing the best forensic facilities available, the FBI was unable to determine the exact explosive used.
No fragments of a mechanical timing device fuse or blasting caps were found. However, a small red plastic and wire piece was located near the site and identified as part of a fishing bobber, which didn’t seem like much at the time.
As city officials carried out their necessary work straight after the attack, the FBI did what local white cops with a poor reputation in African-American communities couldn’t hope to do and canvased accounts from black folks who had been at the church and in the surrounding area. They also drew on contacts, some paid informants, within the Klan’s ranks.
There was immense pressure to find the culprits, to be at least seen as doing the right thing in reaction to this horrific act. Even the Klan carried out an “investigation,” primarily to establish whether there was any conceivable way to blame anyone but the Klan. Such an investigation also had the possible benefit of being able to hand over a sacrificial lamb from within its ranks to save the organization, if necessary.
A reward, initiated by Mayor Boutwell to find the culprits in residential bombings, such as the attacks on the home of leading civil rights attorney and activist Arthur Shores in August and September, was broadened to include an appeal for information on the church bombing. Donations streamed in from around the country, and the reward ballooned to nearly $80,000. Police believed Klan leaders worried that such riches might tempt one of their many poor members to go to the authorities.
State authorities, anxious to prove they were in control and to keep the Feds at arm’s length, made plenty of noise about investigating the tragedy. Colonel Al Lingo, the Director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety, a Wallace appointee who had been the Governor’s pilot during the 1962 gubernatorial campaign, clearly wanted to get one up on the FBI. Word trickled out that Dynamite Bob Chambliss, long suspected as the brains behind most of the explosive destruction in “Bombingham,” was the State’s immediate suspect.
When Lingo announced the arrest of Chambliss, Charles Cagle, and John Wesley Hall on possession of dynamite charges just weeks after the bombing, some believed the case had been solved (and that the FBI had been scooped by the state of Alabama, taking some of the growing pressure off segregationist Governor Wallace).
It was not to be. While the Alabama authorities may have wanted to beat the Feds to the punch, the Klan’s vow of silence and the lack of concrete evidence ensured that any attempt at prosecution was premature.
Eventually, the three were charged with a misdemeanor for dynamite possession, fined one hundred dollars, and let go. The $80,000 reward went unclaimed. Nobody from the KKK was talking. The FBI, however, remained convinced that Chambliss was one of their targets.
At first there was a list of thirty-eight possible suspects, all either members of the KKK or the White Citizens’ Council. That was quickly whittled down to eleven, most of them Cahaba River Bridge Boys. Chambliss and Tommy Blanton were on top of every legitimate investigator’s list, with Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Cash, and Troy Ingram right behind.
Various sources and witnesses had offered snippets of information about the men’s involvement; lie detector tests were routinely failed by the suspects and their associates; and there were numerous reports pointing to the likely use of Blanton’s car in transporting the bomb to the church. The alibis of Chambliss, Blanton, and Cherry for September 13, 14, and 15 also lacked consistency, changing as the FBI’s questioning became more intense.
One Klansman, Mitch Burns, was so moved by the morgue photographs of the murdered girls that he was willing to risk his life by making secret tape recordings of the suspects boasting about their hateful acts.
Other promising recordings of Klan-related conversations were made, specifically of Tommy Blanton, but the FBI, probably correctly at the time, believed the method of recording would make them inadmissible in the increasingly unlikely event the case made it to trial.
Weeks of investigation turned into months, then years. The outrage over the bombing remained acute while the national news media kept tabs on the FBI’s inquiries, but when the Feds’ leads dried up, so too did the widespread coverage. As civil rights protests and incidents flared elsewhere in the South and throughout the country, the spotlight gradually faded on Birmingham, whose boosters were anxious to put the ugliness behind the city.
The African-American community, so used to disappointment and lacking faith in any authority, began speculating that the killers would walk free. However, the FBI made a furious push to solidify their case against the Klansmen. The Klan’s wall of silence had stayed relatively firm, but there were three outside witnesses—reluctant ones, fearful for their safety—who could possibly help crack the case.
One was James Lay, who was part of a volunteer group keeping an eye on churches and homes of civil rights leaders that were potential bombing targets. At about 1:00 a.m. on September 2, Lay was finishing his rounds, driving down 16th Street. As he approached the church, he noticed two white men, one standing near a car while the other was close to the steps that led to the ladies’ lounge.
The suspicious man near the stairs was holding a “grip” or satchel. When Lay hit the bright lights of his car, the two jumped into their vehicle and sped away. He dutifully reported the incident to the police, but officers told Lay, a black man, to “just go on home, boy. You didn’t see a damn thing.” After the church was bombed, Lay again told the authorities about the car and the men he had seen that night. He would later identify Blanton and Chambliss as those men.
Disc jockey “Tall Paul” White, who lived in a boardinghouse behind the church, confirmed that Lay had told him what he had seen and had asked him to keep searching the area for signs of trouble.
At 2:10 a.m. on September 15, a Detroit visitor, Kirthus Glenn, was looking for a parking spot near her friend’s house on 7th Avenue North when she glimpsed the interior light of a car parked in front of Poole’s Funeral Chapel, behind the 16th Street Baptist Church. She saw three white men in the car and got a good look at one of them in the backseat. She would eventually identify him as Chambliss.
At the time, she described the car as a Chevy similar to Blanton’s; later she identified a model and color for the vehicle that was an exact match. She may have even given police the license plate number, but there was no official record of that information having been handed over.
What Glenn saw that night was similar to a story recorded by the FBI from Mary Frances Cunningham, Chambliss’s sister-in-law. Cunningham hated her sister’s husband and provided law enforcement with accounts of Chambliss frequently boasting about his nefarious activities. The night before the bombing she was at the Chambliss house as the phone rang off the hook; clearly, something was up. In a statement to an investigator more than a year after the bombing, Cunningham said that she and her sister Flora, also known as Tee, tracked Dynamite Bob to the church. They allegedly watched as Chambliss and his cohorts, including satchel-carrying Bobby Frank Cherry, went about their business under cover of darkness.
Cunningham tried to warn police, calling a sheriff’s deputy, James Hancock, with whom she had a relationship of information sharing, and perhaps something more, to let him know she suspected Chambliss had set a bomb. Hancock slammed the phone down on her. In the morning, hours before the bomb went off, she repeated the warning, but he failed to report it.
Cunningham was potentially a game-changing witness, but she had let investigators know, in no uncertain terms, she would not testify. She was terrified. Later, she repeatedly recanted the story that she had followed the Klansmen to the church. In fact, she would protest decades later that she never made such a statement to the FBI.
Both Glenn and Lay would also prove to be recalcitrant.
After four years of investigation, the FBI had a great deal of circumstantial evidence and some solid accounts of the involvement of Chambliss and Blanton, and to a lesser extent Cherry and probably Cash. But no smoking gun was identified. There wasn’t even absolute proof a dynamite bomb had killed the girls.
Conviction of white men in the South by all-white, all-male juries was the exception rather than the rule in the mid-sixties, and that was when there was concrete evidence and multiple eyewitness accounts.
The FBI boss, Hoover, no friend to black America, decided with some justification that proceeding with the case and trying to prepare it for trial was a fruitless endeavor. In a confidential internal memo, Hoover shut down the so-called BAPBOMB investigation in 1968 without any charges laid.