I was told that in some classes at my elementary school, and across the South, students applauded, although I just recall a stunned silence when we got news of President Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963.
Our teachers at Glen Oaks Elementary—apparently attuned to the psychological impact—asked us to write about it. I finally got to openly express my admiration for our young President, and remember, quite distinctly, feeling a strong desire to declare my intention to do something important with my own life.
Perhaps I would work toward being the Governor of Alabama or a senator, and then President of the United States, I wrote.
I secretly wanted to be an astronaut, a baseball player like Mickey Mantle, or a footballer like Joe Namath, but you had to shoot for something more realistic.
With the best of intentions, my parents had tried to “protect” me from the ugliness of the church bombing and the racial animus that flared in response. JFK’s assassination, however, was an event covered like no other by news outlets.
The outside world arrived in Glen Oaks on the back of tragedy, and from that point on, my suburban cocoon would frequently be penetrated: from Jack Ruby gunning down Lee Harvey Oswald nine weeks to the day after the church bombing, to Viola Liuzzo’s death at the hands of the Klan, to Bloody Sunday in Selma.
When Hoover made the decision to shut the FBI book on the Birmingham bombing, the country had already started averting its damning gaze from the South as civil unrest flared elsewhere. The nation had much on its mind in 1968: the Vietnam War; housing discrimination; the rise of black consciousness, especially in urban centers; and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.
The change and tumult were filtered by my increasingly anxious, still white, neighborhood, but they were upon us. All schools were finally integrating.
It happened in fits and starts, but integration was profoundly impactful for me. Rather than routinely seeing African-American kids as “other,” we eventually got to share space, ambitions, frustrations, and achievements.
There was widespread community opposition at every step, but the decisive battles to desegregate were fought in the courts, not the streets, including the intended unification of my all-white high school, Fairfield, with the black institution, E.J. Oliver High.
I got the chance to sit in and watch lawyers debate the best way to complete the desegregation process for Fairfield City schools. It was my first experience in a courtroom and I marveled at the rhythm of the process, how waves of information would develop a fuller picture of facts and possibilities with each session.
In the end, the court system, with the best of intentions, ordered a split of school facilities, with white kids in Fairfield (including me) instructed to attend the formerly all-black school for ninth and tenth grades. Older kids, in grades eleven and twelve, black and white, were to squeeze into Fairfield High.
There was a “hell no, we won’t go” reaction from the white community to sending their kids to E.J. Oliver. Many fled the district or headed to private schools. My parents shared the anxiety and sent me to an already integrated school in nearby Bessemer for a semester. With so many kids leaving the school system, however, the plan was unworkable, and the judge ordered the closing of E.J. Oliver. Ninth- through twelfth-graders were to attend Fairfield.
On return to Fairfield for my junior year, the school was absurdly crowded. It was challenging, but there was an unmistakable sense that we were all in it together, and I was mature enough by that stage to realize integration was something that had to be made to work regardless of entrenched preconceptions, fears, and prejudices.
I’d always been an involved member of the school community—there wasn’t an activity I hadn’t tried at least once—and I relished the challenge of contributing to the integration effort. My education on racial issues was fast-tracked—I learned more in one day from a black student’s distress at the Confederate flag on our school band uniforms than I had from years of discussions with adults. I also developed a growing political awareness.
In the spring of 1970, around the country there had been vigorous protests about the Vietnam War and specifically the brutal Cambodian campaign. On May 4, 1970, students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, were demonstrating when all hell broke loose. The Ohio National Guard, called in to disperse the crowd, fired sixty-seven rounds over thirteen seconds, killing four and injuring nine students, permanently paralyzing one.
The victims were basically kids, just a few years older than me. I was, like most young white people in the South, fundamentally conservative and uneasy about any protest that seemed to disrespect the troops in Southeast Asia, but the Kent State incident stuck in my craw.
At overcrowded Fairfield High months later, my teacher decided we were going to debate the shootings. Not a single student wanted to take the side of the Kent State students. Like the rest of the class, I perceived them as unpatriotic hippies, even though the deaths were terrible tragedies.
Nevertheless, when no one else would do it, I acquiesced and agreed to be the “spokesman” for the assaulted students. As I investigated, I felt a grinding sadness and quiet rage, realizing it was indeed a massacre and the students, these kids, had been murdered for exercising their First Amendment right of free speech. What’s more, the principles they stood for were just and reasoned.
A lightbulb went on somewhere in my head (not for the last time, fortunately). I still supported the war effort, but never again would I take as gospel what a government or powerful organization said without fully examining the incident or issue. And I made a vow that I try to uphold to this day—I will always imagine walking in the shoes of others before sitting in judgment.
In my senior year at Fairfield, I had a leadership role as president of the student council, and we stepped up efforts to fully integrate all student activities: football, theater, band, and choir. We even revived the Miss Fairfield Pageant, which, to the horror of some, was won by a black freshman.
Just prior to graduation that spring, I was flattered to be nominated Fairfield High School’s Youth of the Year. One of my mentors, Don Byrd, the former principal of Glen Oaks Elementary and Fairfield High School during its transition period, had written a letter to the Kiwanis Club putting my name forward.
It had all the signs of an inside job, my friends ribbed me, as Don, by then the superintendent of the Fairfield City School System, had a lovely daughter, Donna, whom I was dating. But make no mistake, he knew me well, as I’d worked with him to help the integration cause.
In a glowing letter of recommendation focusing on school integration, Don kindly wrote: “Doug’s leadership between races and amongst students has been most significant.”
I didn’t know it at the time, but that recommendation not only made me Fairfield Youth of the Year but also placed me in a larger competition with seniors from school systems across the county. As a result, much to my surprise, I won the award as the Jefferson County Youth of the Year.
That night, Donna and I rode downtown to stare at the giant electronic sign atop the Bank for Savings building overlooking the city announcing that Doug Jones of Fairfield had been chosen as the Jefferson County Youth of the Year. Amazing what a motivation seeing your name in lights in the company of your teen girlfriend can be. I didn’t know what I’d be doing in the future, but with my proud dad’s counsel that now much was expected of me ringing in my ears, I knew it would involve trying to make a difference.
I’d done well academically at high school, opening the door to a vast array of options for future study. My family, however, didn’t have any experience when it came to college. I would be the first to attend, so I didn’t have insight to draw on when it came to figuring out what field to pursue. In the end, I made a decision that was a prescription for failure.
I was kidding myself when I decided medicine was to be my career. Being a doctor is what bright kids did, right? It didn’t matter that I couldn’t walk by a hospital without feeling uneasy (the product of a childhood hospital spell while being tested for a heart condition) or that the sight of blood made me dizzy; I would learn to love it.
However, I fairly swiftly realized it wasn’t for me. I got through my first year before I broke the news to my parents that I would be continuing at the University of Alabama but studying law instead.
In retrospect, my career fate was probably sealed during those sophomore-year hearings on the school integration process. Also, at college I’d become engaged in campus politics and a push to change the Alabama Constitution and modernize the court system, which hooked me up with the legal fraternity.
A career seemed a long way off, anyway. College life was pregnant with possibilities: politics, fraternity life, sports, clubs. Bottom line: I was determined not to be a spectator.
Extracurricular activities did sometimes threaten to interfere with my study routine, but one summer I got an impactful reminder of why it was wise not to blow the chance I’d been given.
Dad got me a job working the cotton tie mill at U.S. Steel six days a week, ten hours a day. I was young, fit, and hungry to make a few dollars while college was in recess. It would be boring, sure, but think of the beer money!
An hour on the floor of that facility and I wasn’t thinking of anything but the possibility I might not survive the second hour. It was beyond exhausting. If I’d been able to breathe properly, I would have told someone I was worried about dying from heat stroke, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have been able to hear me anyway in the unceasing, clangorous bedlam.
If you allowed yourself to think about it too much, you would realize an accident was inevitable. And that’s what happened. A piece of steel catapulted out of a scrap baller—one of those machines that bind metal together for salvage purposes—and hit me right between my eyes. An inch either way, I would have lost an eye—and probably worse.
Fortunately, the only thing lost that day was any chance I’d falter in my studies.
“You weren’t ever going back there,” my father said. “I knew you’d do well at college then.”
The biggest long-term distraction to study at Alabama was the Watergate hearings. Like millions of other Americans, I was consumed by those events. Public opinion and expectations about our politicians and Washington these days are so low it’s hard to convey how shocking it was when it became clear the Nixon administration had been burglarizing, bugging, and intimidating activists and opponents.
Whatever moral high ground we had been standing on internationally gave way like a sinkhole.
When, on February 6, 1974, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 410–4 to authorize the House Judiciary Committee to investigate whether or not Nixon should be impeached, it was the beginning of a purge that had to happen.
Politics had long been a great passion of mine, but it felt far less noble in the wake of Watergate. Nevertheless, I was active in student affairs. As one of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity representatives in “The Machine,” a not-so-secret political group composed of the fraternities on campus, I ended up being a two-term Student Government Association Senator.
In the spring of 1974, while an SGA Senator, we appropriated funds for the law student association to bring U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas to speak at the university law school, as part of the program commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The judge had been a Beta himself and graciously accepted an invitation to address our fraternity.
I took advantage of my proximity to one of the country’s great jurists to seek a little advice, specifically what suggestions he had for a law student who wanted to be a trial lawyer. Above all, he advocated watching good lawyers ply their trade. It wasn’t just about the words they used but how they physically expressed themselves: their mannerisms and the way they represented their clients before the court and a jury. Don’t mimic, just watch and learn, he said.
I took his advice with me to Cumberland School of Law at Samford University and acted on it when Alabama’s young Attorney General barreled into Birmingham with an ambitious if unlikely plan to get a conviction in the fourteen-year-old 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case.
I’d first been struck by the rise of that young prosecutor from Dothan, Alabama, when I was a teen. Like the students at Kent State, he didn’t look much older than me, yet at the time, twenty-eight-year-old Bill Baxley was the District Attorney in Houston County and running for the office of State Attorney General.
He was a political moderate with a progressive outlook at a time when that approach to public life got you trouble rather than a promising career in the South. But in January 1971 Baxley, a 1964 graduate of the University of Alabama Law School, became the youngest State Attorney General in the United States.
Alabama was a one-party state. Democrats controlled everything. In 1970, George Wallace, fresh off his third-party run for the presidency, narrowly edged gubernatorial incumbent Albert Brewer in the Democratic runoff.
Wallace had done what he did best, and conducted a brutal, race-baiting campaign. And once again, a majority of Alabamians casting ballots bought into it. It was, however, an election chock-full of ironies.
Alabama had reempowered the veteran, cynical, pragmatic, win-at-any-cost governor—but just behind him was Jere Beasley, elected as Lieutenant Governor, and the new Attorney General, Bill Baxley. Both were young and energetic rising stars. On the judicial side of the ballot, Howell Heflin was elected Chief Justice on the promise of modernizing Alabama’s court system. All three were about as far away from Wallace as you could be and still get elected. Even with the segregation-supporting Governor back, surely the future looked bright to those hoping for change in Alabama.
Baxley, in particular, had an advantage Wallace and countless others from either side of politics could not suppress or hijack; his whole reason for being was shaped by truths learned and instilled in him as a young boy. He never saw a reason to relinquish those beliefs, and with every day that goes by, his commitment is vindicated.
Baxley can trace his Alabama lineage back to the late 1700s, when his people decided to leave South Carolina and settle in a southeast portion of the state wedged between the Georgia and Florida border. The town of Dothan, Bill’s birthplace, grew up around them. All four of his great-grandfathers were Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. His granddaddy was Dothan’s mayor, and his father, Keener Baxley, a respected circuit court judge.
The Baxleys were Southern gentlefolk in a region that became best known for peanut production. It was, however, never part of the plantation belt, so some of the plantation mentality that evolved from slave ownership wasn’t automatically handed down to prominent white families in that corner of southeastern Alabama, even if the local black population still battled racism and endured Jim Crow. “Dothan, relative to the rest of Alabama, was an oasis of moderation on racism,” Baxley said. “But it was still a daily reality for the black population as I grew up.”
Born June 27, 1941, Bill was a precocious child in an extraordinary family deeply attached to the South. Indeed, he didn’t feel the need to go any further north than Chattanooga, Tennessee, or beyond Memphis to the west until he was twenty-one. Additionally, all his schooling was spent in all-white public schools, including college and law school, until his last year at the University of Alabama, which was integrated in 1963. Yet the Baxleys, unlike many Southern establishment families, were not encumbered with a perceived need to perpetuate a strict color line.
Young Bill, from a tender age, entertained the idea of being a politician. He was also outspoken. Attending the local Methodist church, he noted the inconsistency of what was preached with the reality of what was going on in the streets. “From my earliest memory, I just felt it was inherently wrong the way blacks were treated in my hometown and in my home state,” he said. “I just wasn’t comfortable with it and no one ever adequately explained,” he said. “[So] I kept asking.”
His parents, concerned for his prospects and safety, would gently encourage him to “tone it down.” “My dad, who was a good person, would say ‘son, I’m glad you feel that way, and I always want you to treat people fairly, but you need to watch what you are saying because there is absolutely nothing you can do about it and you are just going to ruin yourself.’”
Baxley and his younger brother, Wade, were often cared for during the day by James Owens, a black man hired by their busy parents. The three developed a close bond. The Baxley boys were confounded and incensed when they’d take a trip downtown and Owens would be made to wait outside a store because of his color. “It didn’t make sense,” Baxley said. “I let people know.” When Owens eventually moved to Detroit, where he expected a little decency, it was a firm signal to Bill that his questioning of local attitudes was justified.
As a teen in the mid-1950s, television reports alluding to how blacks were being treated across Alabama stoked Bill’s outrage. When he learned about Rosa Parks, Dr. King, and the bus boycott in Montgomery, it confirmed something could and was being done. While studying at the University of Alabama, he became politically active, supporting the national Democratic Party cause in Alabama with work on John F. Kennedy’s successful 1960 presidential tilt.
He also got behind local moderate and reformist politicians such as Tom King of Birmingham.
In 1961, King ran for mayor of Birmingham with the support of Baxley and others at the university, including student leader Julian Butler, only to be defeated by hardline segregationist Art Hanes. King’s son, Tom King Jr., recently noted that Hanes was “out front, but the man behind the curtain was Bull Connor.”
The Kings were anything but friends of the Klan. According to Tom King Jr., the animosity, actually hatred, stemmed mainly from family patriarch Judge Alta King’s decision in 1957 to jail four Klansmen for maximum sentences of twenty years for kidnapping and castrating a black man named Judge Edward Aaron.
When Alta’s son Tom stood for mayor, segregationists acted to ensure his chance was over before polling began. Before the election, King, as a courtesy, met with Connor, the incumbent Commissioner of Public Safety. As King left the brief meeting, someone called out to him. He turned, and a black man reached out to shake his hand. King naturally obliged. It was a setup.
Diane McWhorter detailed “the black-hand treatment” in her book Carry Me Home. She wrote that supporters of King’s political opponent, Art Hanes, had staged the encounter.
As Tom King explained: “They fixed him up and put him out there to shake Dad’s hand.” As he did, a photographer in a nearby office snapped shots. It was a career killer in the country’s most segregated city. King, who according to his son had been painted by the fear-mongering Klan as a man “sent by JFK and Dr. King to integrate the schools,” became a dead man walking, politically speaking. Such was the tenor of politics in Birmingham in the sixties.
On June 11, 1963, from a window at the University of Alabama law school, Baxley watched George Wallace’s dog and pony show at the entrance to Foster Auditorium—the infamous Stand in the Schoolhouse Door. As the Governor symbolically tried to block two African-American students from entering the university, Baxley quietly vowed to make Wallace eat his infamous words, uttered at his inaugural months before: “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
Baxley recognized that Jim Crow laws and mores should have been left behind decades before in the South, but blatant injustices not only continued to be tolerated, they were touted as “normal.” He knew then, on the threshold of a law career, what his purpose would be.
Sundays in college were for reflection and relaxation, and on September 15, 1963, the only thing on Baxley’s schedule was a leisurely lunch at the fraternity house and an afternoon watching the National Football League. Then the news flash: a bomb in a Birmingham church … children … death.
Baxley was reeling. He felt sick to his stomach. His first impulse was to head to the scene, if only to provide sodas for rescuers, but that was pointless. Perhaps he would take a sabbatical from law school and volunteer his help to U.S. Attorney Macon Weaver, whom he had met on the Kennedy campaign and had seen standing alongside Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach during the Wallace schoolhouse circus.
In the end, he resisted any knee-jerk reaction, though later that same day he made a promise to himself to do whatever he could to ensure the bombers were caught and held accountable. Over time, he monitored the investigation closely. The authorities’ inability to bring anyone to justice by the time he graduated law school in 1964 meant the case would haunt him for a long time to come.
Out of law school, he spent a year working as a law clerk at the Alabama Supreme Court. But it was in federal court where the real action was taking place. Many of these federal cases were pivotal civil rights matters involving attorneys such as Charles Morgan Jr., and Baxley was a keen observer. “I was seeing the legal walls of segregation crumble,” Baxley said. “I’ve named three of my children for federal judges.”
After his clerkship, Baxley headed off for military service before taking up a position with a firm in Dothan. In 1968 he jumped at the chance to become District Attorney for Houston and Henry Counties, and at the age of twenty-five, he became the youngest DA in the state. A serious young man, he had a deep voice that he regularly activated to argue forcefully about the things that mattered most. He didn’t shy away from a fight.
In 1970 Baxley ran for State Attorney General despite his youth (he was twenty-eight years old) and the opposition of powerful conservative forces. He swept into office like a hurricane, pursuing corruption issues and curtailing excess. He moved swiftly to ensure courtroom challenges to block black voting rights were run out of the system.
“First thing I did was dismiss all these cases that were pending to stop blacks from voting and stopping blacks from being on juries … segregation cases. I dismissed them all,” he said. But before he did, Baxley let Governor George Wallace know what he planned.
Wallace had great respect for Baxley, and despite the Governor’s outrageous public persona and reprehensible policies, the young AG got to know him as a man who was surprisingly amenable in private consultation. “He was charming,” Baxley said. “I told Wallace I was going to do it—he just said ‘do whatever you think you’ve got to do.’”
After Baxley stirred controversy in 1972 by appointing Alabama’s first black Assistant Attorney General, Myron Thompson, Wallace was quietly supportive and curious, leading Baxley to conclude that he was never fully comfortable as a hardline segregationist and may have been thinking about changing his attitude.
Still, Wallace knew that bigotry and segregationist grandstanding were the keys to longevity in Alabama. Baxley equally understood his progressive agenda probably wouldn’t buy him a lot of time as a public official. “My attitude was, ‘you’re here, you may not be here long, so you better do what you can,’” he said. And his number one priority was the girls who died at 16th Street Baptist.
The FBI had ended its investigation into the church bombing without bringing charges in 1968. But the desire for justice never grew dim for Baxley. He wrote the names of the bombing victims on each corner of his government-issued phone card, and he carried it everywhere. Within a couple of weeks of being appointed, he had the files on the case from the police and sheriff’s offices. They were full of potholes.
“The first ones I looked at were the state troopers in Montgomery, and I got copies of [the] Birmingham police file and Jefferson County Sheriff file,” Baxley said. “They weren’t much help. They’d spent most of their man hours on this crazy theory that the blacks themselves had done the bombing in order to gain sympathy for their cause.”
Local law enforcement had the challenge of dealing with significant numbers of Klan sympathizers in their ranks, which stunted some inquiries. Also, the FBI took over the investigation early in the process, prematurely curtailing other inquiries. Without access to FBI files—Baxley and his team were repeatedly denied—Baxley’s investigators, headed by Jack Shows, were left to piece together leads from the compromised police and sheriff documents.
The FBI had plenty of reasons to be sensitive about opening its files. Sources and informants within the ranks of the Klan, for example, were still threatened by the “kiss of death.” Even the hint that someone had talked to the Feds could have lethal consequences.
There was also a lot to cover up. The FBI had used people like Klansman Gary Thomas Rowe as a prime paid informant and in doing so effectively gave him a pass to engage in, even initiate, some of the organization’s most violent attacks, including the beating of the Freedom Riders at the bus station in Birmingham in May 1961. He also played a role—indeed, a murderous role—in the death of Viola Liuzzo, the civil rights volunteer shot dead by Klansmen after the Selma to Montgomery marches.
Using a plethora of incomplete, often inaccurate information, Baxley tried to set about charging those responsible for the deaths of the girls. It was a protracted process, and he was destined to take numerous detours and wrong turns—some that opened other cold cases and led to convictions.
The old Klansmen, as always, felt they had nothing to fear. It had happened years ago, the FBI had dropped the case like a stone off a cliff, and no one had a chance in hell of uncovering what had happened—not now, not tomorrow, not ever.
Baxley’s presence in the Alabama capital was a breath of fresh air for some, and he backed up his promise of a new and inclusive approach to refining and enforcing Alabama justice by making radical changes in operations, personnel, and priorities. Yet when it came to his number one goal, he was stumped. There was but a scintilla of useful material in the investigation documents he had at his disposal. Promising investigative work seemed to stop abruptly or go nowhere. Clearly, local determination to solve the crime had been underwhelming in some cases and actively undercut in others.
Baxley stepped up efforts to secure the FBI files, but the agency was stonewalling. J. Edgar Hoover, who had seemingly been FBI Director since Moses was in the bulrushes, had brought down the curtain on the matter, and that was that.
When the FBI boss died in May 1972, the Alabama AG hoped the situation would change. Unfortunately, it did not. Baxley made numerous trips to Washington from 1973 to 1975 to try and convince the FBI to give him access to the investigative file, always coming back empty-handed. The Bureau, then headed by Birmingham Special Agent in Charge Clarence Kelley, was as uncooperative as the Klan, if a little more polite.
Baxley was absolutely on his own in pushing this task forward. It was already a cold case that had years before received more federal attention than virtually any other investigation in the South. To some of the few people aware he was looking into it, his actions were obsessive and borderline reckless.
Even the black community, to a great extent, had internalized the pain of the loss and lack of justice. While it would never be swept under the carpet, it was almost too painful to talk about. After so many hundreds of years of abominable treatment at the hands of the law, lack of resolution in a matter such as this was standard operating procedure (though never acceptable).
The lack of FBI cooperation sent Baxley off on numerous wild-goose chases. While he laments “wasting time” chasing one long-enduring suspect, Georgia’s J. B. Stoner, for the 16th Street church bombing, Baxley at least got the satisfaction of nailing him for the 1958 bombing of Reverend Shuttlesworth’s Bethel Baptist Church. Stoner was a man who thought Hitler too moderate, who compared blacks to apes and Jews to vipers.
In a different instance, following another church bombing tip, Baxley looked into Klan members in Montgomery who included murderers, bombers, and lunatics fully as bad as those in Birmingham. In the course of the investigation, Baxley’s team established that the Klansmen were responsible for the 1957 murder of African-American Willie Edwards, a driver for the Winn-Dixie supermarket chain. They’d dragged him into a car, beaten him, then forced him to jump to his death off the Tyler-Goodwin Bridge into the Alabama River. The case had gone cold, but Baxley eventually (in 1976) reopened it and charged four men with Edwards’s murder.
Sadly, a jury would never get to decide the fate of the defendants. Judge Frank Embry dismissed the charges because the actual cause of death had not been determined. He suggested, rather bizarrely, that “merely forcing” Edwards to jump off the bridge “probably” didn’t lead to his death. The investigation into Willie Edwards’s killing, like several other key civil rights–related cases, would be reopened in the late nineties (although no one was ever charged).
On yet another frustrating trip to Washington in 1975, Baxley had dinner with Jack Nelson, a distinguished journalist from Alabama working for the Los Angeles Times. Born in Talladega, Nelson got his start in Mississippi, at the Biloxi Daily Herald. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for local reporting at the Atlanta Constitution and moved to Washington, D.C., in 1965 as the Los Angeles Times Bureau Chief.
Nelson’s influence was significant enough in 1970 for J. Edgar Hoover to put him on one of his secret watch lists. The FBI supremo’s ire was raised when Nelson wrote a story about how the FBI had teamed with Meridian, Mississippi, police in a sting operation against the KKK where two Klan members had been ambushed and killed.
That night over dinner and drinks, Baxley vented about the uncooperative FBI, letting Nelson know he was desperate to find a way to get the agency to at least hand over some files, more than twelve years after the crime and four since the AG had started looking into it. Without access to the FBI files, the investigation would likely go nowhere.
A few days later Nelson let him know that Baxley might be getting a call offering assistance. Apparently, the journalist had cornered Attorney General Edward Levi, recently appointed by President Ford, and told him the Los Angeles Times was planning a series of front-page stories about the reopening of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case. A major angle in the story would be how the FBI and Justice Department would not cooperate with the Alabama Attorney General, thus allowing the murderers to remain free. Nelson told Levi he planned to bring the children’s parents to Washington and hold a press conference to complain that the FBI and the Justice Department were covering up facts about the murders. It was a ruse, but it took only a week for Levi’s office to let Nelson know that Baxley would get the cooperation he needed.
As the AG’s campaign for justice over the bombing became more widely known, there was an outcry from some community leaders who suggested the case should be “left alone” after so many years. The segregationists had always disliked Baxley, but now they had an excuse to hate him publicly. He was called a “nigger lover” and a “disgrace to his race,” among other things. Abuse from whites in restaurants and on the street wasn’t uncommon. Threatening letters often came his way, and in his second term, there was concern he was on a KKK hit list.
Not surprising was a letter of hate from Edward Fields, a Georgia chiropractor who along with J. B. Stoner ran the right-wing National States’ Rights Party. In a three-page diatribe, Fields called the AG a “traitor” to his race for having the temerity to investigate those “good, white, Christian Anglo-Saxon men.” Baxley responded on official State letterhead:
Dear “Dr.” Fields,
My response to your letter of February 19, 1976 is—kiss my ass.
Sincerely,
Bill Baxley
Attorney General
More than forty years after former Marine Bob Eddy found his calling in law enforcement, he still exhibits many of the qualities that made him a uniquely gifted sleuth. An effervescent eighty-six-year-old today, Eddy is handy with a joke and has a rich trove of tales about Southern justice, but he’s also a trained listener with a proven ability to seize on nuggets of truth and insight others might miss.
A Korean War veteran, he was at one point a salesman and department head at Sears, but it was a downturn in the fortunes of Eddy’s side interests—a restaurant and construction businesses in Huntsville, Alabama, in the 1970s—that ended up being one of the best things to happen to the church bombing investigation. That’s because Eddy, a family man, was seeking to make up for an income shortfall and opted to take up an offer from one of the regulars at his Dixie Belle lunch joint.
Madison County Sheriff Jerry Crabtree suggested Eddy could make a few extra bucks operating as a deputy at night. Eddy hit the ground running and quickly developed into the department’s top-gun investigator. In November 1976, Baxley hired him as his prime investigator and a few months later told him that for the next ninety days he had only one assignment: he was to go to Birmingham and read every file on the bombing case.
It was an eleventh-hour push on a thirteen-year-old case, as Baxley’s term was coming to an end. He was desperate to make some progress toward an indictment. Eddy was instructed to camp at Birmingham’s Holiday Inn and work out of the Bureau’s local office.
The assumption was that Eddy would be able to draw the curtain back by delving into all FBI files. But that was not the way the Bureau “cooperated.” Instead, he was only allowed to read what he specifically requested. “Unless you knew what to ask for, you didn’t get it,” Baxley said.
Eddy solicited the help of an old Huntsville friend, FBI agent Ed Kennedy, who was working in Birmingham. Kennedy was able to secure an arrangement to give Eddy better access to the records on the provision that whatever notes he made for Baxley he’d also provide to the local FBI.
It was painstaking work. Eddy would read and reread files, taking handwritten notes. An office worker would help him type the notes up and send a copy to Baxley in Montgomery and preserve one for the FBI bosses in Birmingham.
The puzzle came together relatively quickly. There were three prime suspects: Bob Chambliss, Tommy Blanton, and Bobby Frank Cherry. Troy Ingram, who had died in 1975, was also in the mix, and Herman Cash was likely involved. “It looked as though a few dozen of them [in the KKK] had knowledge of it,” Baxley said. Witness interrogation and interviews with former investigators confirmed this belief. Eddy knew Dynamite Bob Chambliss was the principal participant.
It was clear the FBI had known this all along, almost from day one. They even bugged the Chambliss house by placing a microphone in a cuckoo clock, but they picked up frequent, loud cuckoos and not much else.
It was not only Chambliss’s movements around the time of the bombing and subsequent statements that put him front and center in the FBI investigation. There were witnesses, too. But as Baxley and his team were to discover, the Klan had extensive reach. Getting people to commit to detailing what they knew about the seventy-three-year-old Chambliss and the others in a court of law would be as difficult in 1977 as it had been when the Cahaba River Bridge Boys had run roughshod over Birmingham in the sixties.
A local civil defense volunteer, a visitor from Detroit, and a close relative of Chambliss held the key. If they committed to testifying, Baxley might very well have a case. If not, the bombing investigation would be stalled again, probably for good.
Robert Edward Chambliss was ornery and odious. Actually, he was far worse than that, but even if you had no idea he was a murderous, racist thug, he came across as a mess of a man. According to some who met him, he was as explosive as one of his many incendiary devices and with a short fuse to boot.
“He was just a weirdo,” Eddy said, and having spent almost a year digging into the Klansman’s background, the investigator knew what he was talking about. “No one could like him.”
He was obviously hell to live with, which, as it turned out, was a rare blessing for the church bombing investigators. Chambliss’s wife, sister-in-law, and niece were terrified of him but also repulsed enough by his nefarious activities to seek ways to expose his god-awfulness.
Yet, the records of their risky efforts to get authorities to rid their family and city of this dangerous bigot sat in dusty, dog-eared manila folders and flimsy cardboard containers for more than a dozen years, apparently without being afforded more than a glance. It’s likely they would have remained unexplored for at least another quarter century had it not been for the determination of Baxley’s team.
By the time Baxley loaded Eddy up with a box of documents in January 1977 and sent him off to Birmingham to read everything he could get his hands on, Chambliss was retired but still an angry old troublemaker. No longer physically imposing, he remained unrepentant for the many bombings and the assorted violence he’d inflicted on Birmingham for nearly a half-century.
He’d offended most everyone he’d met in his capacity as a city employee or truck driver and enjoyed bragging about his arson exploits, such as telling his kin he liked “playing with matches” after the torching of a black family’s house.
If he’d lived in a society that gave a damn about crimes against the black community, Dynamite Bob would have lived out most of his years inside a jail cell. But in Birmingham, he’d spent his life free to pistol-whip people, beat his wife, blow stuff up, and drink booze with his unapologetic racist buddies under the Cahaba River Bridge.
He appeared to lack empathy for anyone, even his Klan cohorts, and demonstrated almost childlike impatience, impulsivity, and peculiarities. Before he left the house each day, he would have his long-suffering wife, Tee, carefully comb his thinning hair. In a rare moment of apparent passivity and contentment, he would sit still, like an obedient boy, to be groomed. Eddy was right—he was a weirdo!
Chambliss was the number one suspect when the FBI closed the case in 1968, but you wouldn’t have necessarily known that by looking at local law enforcement files. Even when he got wind of Baxley sniffing around the case, Chambliss had reason to feel relatively confident that he would remain out of the clutches of authorities.
Eddy didn’t know the FBI had been instructed by Attorney General Levi to help out Baxley’s team. Certainly, the local G-men didn’t swamp him with information or encouragement when he first started sorting through documents. The FBI’s obstinate approach to sharing information still riles Baxley and infuriates and baffles many others associated with the case to this day. The protection of sources and informants, understandably, was a primary concern, but the institutional reluctance to share even innocuous information seemed to go beyond reasonable operational priorities.
Fortunately, even though Eddy was taking a stab in the dark each time he requested a file, those guesses gradually became educated. Also, after initially being ignored or dismissed by the agents, he managed to gain their respect, and there was an occasional unsolicited push in an interesting direction. “I found if you promised them it would never see the light of day they’d live by that … that’s the way they get information. They understand that sort of agreement.”
Playing by the FBI’s rules and working out of their offices in the 2121 Building in Birmingham made an investigation possible even if it was frequently compromised. Eddy insists the men and women on the ground for the Feds shouldn’t be blamed. “They did want it solved. They did want it done. Some of them, when I first went in there, would tell me I’m wasting my time, but after a while, it turned around, and they started being more helpful with everything,” Eddy said. “They started making people available.” Gaining access to old FBI agents who had worked the case was particularly valuable.
Despite the obstacles, Eddy confirmed the FBI case led inextricably to Chambliss; Tommy Blanton, an angry, calculating man; and motormouthed Bobby Frank Cherry, who loved to brag and fight, and brag some more. Another suspect, Herman Cash, was less obvious, but the clear indication was that at least three of these men arrived at the church in Blanton’s car to place the bomb under the stairs in the early hours of September 15, 1963.
The FBI conclusions had been based, in part, on the results of batteries of polygraph tests with Klan members and their connections in the sixties, observations and finger-pointing from witnesses, and statements from the suspects themselves, whose shaky alibis regularly changed. In Chambliss’s case, his purchase and possession of dynamite around the time of the bombing helped place him squarely in Eddy’s crosshairs.
But some of the weightiest pieces of evidence that eventually came across Eddy’s desk were clumps of insight from a few women who had endured Chambliss at close range for decades. What Chambliss’s niece Elizabeth Hood (later Cobbs) and sister-in-law Mary Frances Cunningham told the Feds elevated Eddy’s fishing expedition to the status of a focused hunt.
One complication was that the women’s cooperation in the sixties had been cloaked in secrecy—Hood was eventually given the code name Abingdon Spaulding, and Cunningham, Gail Tarrant. It made for confusing reading when these names popped up without context amid thousands of pages. Eddy was frustratingly left to work this out for himself over weeks in the offices of an organization full of people who could have simply outlined the puzzle to him over a cup of coffee.
But before he had even contemplated the complicated business of identifying informants, Eddy was stunned by statements attributed to Hood about what she had heard and witnessed in the Chambliss household. Glimpses of her uncle’s bomb-making exploits had been a feature of her upbringing, and she came to understand that barking hateful comments sprinkled with racial slurs was pretty much his idea of a conversation.
In front of the family, Chambliss had often stated a desire to oppose integration violently and dwelled on his obsession with bombs. According to Hood, these threats peaked in the days before the church bombing as he warned he had “enough stuff to flatten half of Birmingham.” Ominously, he told the household something so big was about to happen that “they’ll beg us to segregate.”
Chambliss, often riled by family taunts that he and his KKK friends liked to talk up their bombings and bashings, couldn’t help himself on that fateful weekend, blurting: “Watch the news tonight and see if this one is big enough.”
Hood explained that her mother’s side of the family detested Chambliss but lived in fear of Dynamite Bob and his Klan brothers. She, however, was prepared to testify against him if she knew he would be convicted, she had told the FBI.
Eddy could hardly believe it: the Bureau had this incredible witness, then … nothing. The document trail suddenly went cold. He knew there had to be more. He consulted Baxley, and they resolved to get to the source—to find Hood.
Birmingham Mayor David Vann assigned two Birmingham policemen to the case, Jack LeGrand and Sergeant Ernest Cantrell. Both had worked on the bombing investigation with dedication and without prejudice in 1963. Called into action by Eddy and Baxley, Cantrell quickly located Hood in Birmingham. She was married and went by Elizabeth Cobbs, and had become a Methodist minister, the first woman to be ordained in Alabama history.
In their first conversation, Cobbs assumed Eddy knew more than he did, confirmation for the investigator that there was much more to be learned from the files. “I wasn’t there that night. I took Tee’s place,” she told him. Eddy knew that Tee was Chambliss’s wife; but what did she mean by taking her place? He had to let her believe that he knew what she was talking about.
The interview was a strain. Cobbs obviously feared retribution from her uncle and the Klan, and repeatedly said she would not testify. She did, however, repeat much of what she’d told the FBI thirteen years before.
Eddy would eventually piece together that Cobbs had faded from the FBI records to protect her as a witness and that Tee Chambliss’s sister, Mary Frances Cunningham, was the mysterious Gail Tarrant. Both women had given priceless information to the authorities that went beyond recounting Chambliss’s threats.
The extent of their commitment to steer authorities to Chambliss was remarkable. They had cooperated with investigators as best they believed they could. Their personal observations about what went on at the time of the bombing also undoubtedly contained information gleaned from or provided by Tee Chambliss, Dynamite Bob’s wife. Indeed, Mary Frances Cunningham and Cobbs once told the FBI that they had been eyewitnesses to the Klansmen, including Chambliss, delivering something, likely the bomb, to the church around two in the morning of September 15. Unsettlingly, though, they did not give their blockbuster stories to the FBI until fifteen months after the bombing.
Why did Cunningham and Cobbs wait so long to report their alleged eyewitness accounts? Eddy wasn’t the first and will certainly not be the last investigator to ponder that question, but overriding it was one terrible, verifiable fact: law enforcement had been warned about what was going to happen in the hours before the explosion.
FBI records indicate that in December 1964, Cobbs told FBI agents that she and Cunningham (referred to as Tarrant in the FBI account) donned wigs and followed Chambliss on the night of September 14, ultimately ending up near the 16th Street Baptist Church in the early morning hours of September 15.
In talking to Eddy thirteen years later, Cobbs explained it was actually Tee, not her, who was with Cunningham. Cobbs had been articulating what the other two women said they had observed.
The women had alleged that they watched Blanton’s car carrying Blanton, Chambliss, Cherry, and possibly Cash pull up near the church, just outside Poole’s Funeral Chapel. One man, whom they believed to be Cherry, emerged from the car carrying a bag or a satchel and walked down an alley to the church. Once he deposited it, his accomplices drove to him. He got in, and the group departed.
After talking with Cobbs, Eddy immediately tried to track down Cunningham’s FBI informant file. It eventually appeared on his desk with a “you’ve never seen this” understanding. With it, he was able to verify the Cunningham narrative was the same as Cobbs’s story.
The investigator convinced a reluctant Cobbs to set up a meeting for him with Cunningham. Clearly terrified, even more than a decade after the bombing, “Gail Tarrant” told him point-blank she would not testify but reiterated how Chambliss would talk about “bombing niggers, including the church.”
She also detailed the intensely hostile reaction the children’s marches in the spring of 1963 had generated among the Klansmen, who frequently visited the Chambliss home. One night, when Blanton came calling, Cunningham baited them, saying the Klansmen weren’t going to do anything, that they were all talk. Blanton flew into a rage and launched into a tirade, saying he’d get his machine gun and “mow down all those niggers” by himself if no one else was going to do anything about them.
Much of what Cunningham said reinforced the picture Eddy had been piecing together from other FBI documents. Both Cunningham and Cobbs were often at Tee’s side in the Chambliss house. There was little doubt they had observed much of what they reported while also passing on what the Klansman’s wife had told them.
Cunningham felt she could never come out publicly against her brother-in-law in part because that would compromise her sister’s safety. Additionally, the woman who became the FBI’s mysterious Gail Tarrant would have an immense bounty on her head if it were discovered that she had been an ongoing law enforcement informant since the early 1960s. She had been supplying information to a Birmingham sheriff’s deputy, James Hancock. Eddy was staggered when he learned that after her night of alleged surveillance with Tee, Cunningham had called Hancock around 2:30 a.m. to inform him of what they had allegedly seen at the church. She wanted him to know she thought the men were setting a bomb, but he hung up on her.
After the sun came up they talked on the phone again—Cunningham said she repeated her suspicions. They set up a meeting where she repeated the story that her brother-in-law and the other men had planted a bomb at the church. Hancock had not called in the information overnight and did not act immediately after meeting with Cunningham. He later told Eddy that he was driving in the direction of downtown to look into it when he heard about the explosion on the radio. “Just one phone call from Hancock,” Eddy said. “It would never have happened.”
In interviews with Baxley’s team, Cobbs and Cunningham eventually recanted the story they had told the FBI in 1964 of following the Klansmen to the church. Instead, they said, they had deduced at the time that something was going to happen because of Chambliss’s strange behavior and the flurry of Klan activity that night.
There was, however, no doubt that Cunningham called Hancock around 2:30 a.m. to warn him and followed up by spelling out her concerns in the morning before the bomb exploded. Hancock confirmed to the FBI during the original investigation and subsequently to Eddy that he’d received that early-morning call and eventually got information about a possible bomb hours before the 10:22 a.m. explosion.
Cobbs said Cunningham had concocted the tale of surveillance because the family had waited fifteen months for Hancock to do something with the information. With no action taken against Chambliss, they decided to present what they knew to the FBI in what they perceived to be the most forceful way, as eyewitnesses to the planting of a bomb at the church.
Over the years, many have speculated that Mrs. Cunningham’s relationship with Hancock went beyond information sharing. A romance, perhaps, complicated matters and may be the reason that Hancock did not immediately report her warning. Certainly that would explain, to some degree, why the married cop would slam down his home phone on her at two or three in the morning.
On reviewing the FBI statements of both Cobbs and Cunningham, it’s striking how similar they are—almost verbatim. It seems a little odd, and perhaps contributed to why the Feds didn’t initially appear to wholeheartedly embrace the eyewitness allegations.
Significantly, though, not a single investigator who worked the case thought Mrs. Cunningham’s account of the bomb delivery was pure fantasy, even if she wasn’t an eyewitness. She knew what had gone down, possibly by piecing together what the women had heard that Saturday night as they took calls in the Chambliss residence and monitored the movements of the Klansmen. “I still go back and forth on whether she was there,” Baxley said recently. “I know she knew exactly what happened—that I don’t doubt—but was she there? I don’t really know.”
Baxley did try to convince Cunningham to consider testifying, but she would not entertain the idea, insisting she would deny everything. It would have been difficult to use her even if she had agreed, as Tee’s safety most certainly would have been compromised. Additionally, even though the investigators were (and still are) convinced Cunningham’s description of that night was exactly what happened, any decent defense lawyer would have a field day shooting holes in her story and attacking her credibility.
The best Baxley could realistically hope for was valuable testimony from Cobbs detailing the threats uttered by Dynamite Bob and the frantic activity in the house associated with the Klan in the lead-up to the bombing. Despite initially telling Baxley she would not take the stand, Cobbs eventually tentatively agreed.
To ensure they could have a shot at proving to a jury what everyone associated with the investigation already knew, Baxley’s team needed someone who could provide a similar eyewitness account of the bomb planting at the church in those early hours of September 15 and would be prepared to stand by it in a court of law.
Eddy finally unearthed the gem the team had been seeking from the mountain of FBI files—a woman who had observed activity around the church during those overnight hours in an account that uncannily matched elements of the original Cobbs/Cunningham story.
Kirthus Glenn was a Detroit seamstress who had been visiting her old hometown of Birmingham that fateful weekend. As she was coming home from a night on the town at about 2:10 a.m., she spotted a car later identified as Blanton’s as she was looking for a place to park.
She was with a friend, Henry Smith, when she noticed, parked near the church, a white-over-turquoise Chevrolet with a tall CB radio antenna. The dome light of the car was on, illuminating the presence of three white men in the vehicle. White men loitering in a black neighborhood during the overnight hours was most notable in 1963 Birmingham. She would later identify one of the men as Dynamite Bob Chambliss.
Glenn’s companion saw much the same thing, although he admitted to being drunk and thought the car was red.
Glenn had given her account on a number of occasions, yet thirteen years later, despite multiple visits from Baxley’s team to her home in Michigan, she steadfastly refused to return to Alabama or commit to testifying in the case. That is, until Baxley himself, over coffee, cookies, and pleasant conversation at her Detroit home, finally found the hook to reel her in.
As he grew more frustrated with Glenn’s refusal, he noticed on her coffee table a copy of an old Jet magazine featuring a story about the Montgomery bus boycott, including a photograph of Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks with their attorney, a very young Fred Gray. By this time, Gray was a member of the Alabama Legislature, one of the first blacks elected to serve. He and Baxley had become friends.
Baxley showed Glenn the picture: “Dr. King and Mrs. Parks trusted this man to represent them,” he said. “If I can get him up here to talk to you, would you consider changing your mind about testifying?”
“Well, I’d consider it,” she said.
Sensing what he described as a “sea change” in her attitude, Baxley immediately called Gray at his Tuskegee office and got his agreement for a trip to Detroit. The AG arranged for a state airplane to transport his friend, and a day or so later, the men headed to Glenn’s house.
Ms. Glenn sized up the new guest. She placed the Jet magazine next to Gray’s face and scrutinized it: the picture in the magazine was twenty years old, but fortunately Fred had aged well. “It is you,” she said.
Glenn reluctantly agreed to testify. Baxley and his team had a case.
It was a solid, albeit circumstantial, case against Chambliss, but the investigators wanted more on the other suspected participants. If nobody could say for sure that Cherry was one of the culprits, maybe the notably verbose former ammunitions specialist would do it himself. He was renowned in Klan and law enforcement circles for saying “too much.”
Eddy took a trip to Grand Prairie, Texas, to visit Cherry, who had moved to the Lone Star State some years before. The mouthy bigot was reluctant to meet with Eddy, but so loved talking about himself that once the interview got rolling it was hard to shut him up. He came ever so close to at least revealing he had knowledge of what happened the morning of the bombing.
Cherry seemed to delight in walking the fine line, almost teasing his interrogator. Toward the end of the interview, Eddy decided to see if he could knock Cherry off-balance. He let the old windbag know there was an eyewitness who had seen him carrying the bomb satchel to the church. “He immediately knew things weren’t looking so good,” Eddy said.
Cherry clammed up. Eddy suggested he think over an offer to talk more about the situation, to provide his interpretation of events. Sure enough, the phone rang at Eddy’s hotel around midnight, but an angry Cherry wasn’t calling to confess anything.
“Chambliss didn’t tell you about me,” Cherry fumed.
Calmly, Eddy replied, “I never said Chambliss told me anything.”
With that, Cherry said he was through talking and slammed the telephone down.
Back in Birmingham, Eddy traced the calls from Cherry’s house that night and found the Klansman had called an auto parts store in Birmingham owned by Bob Gafford, a businessman and Klan sympathizer. It wasn’t hard to imagine Chambliss being quickly informed of Cherry’s presumption that he’d been exposed by Dynamite Bob. Apparently, Gafford had provided the reassurance Cherry needed that Chambliss had done no such thing.
Eddy knew he was on the right trail.
Baxley later traveled to Texas to try his hand with Cherry, but the two firebrands didn’t get anything but high blood pressure from their angry exchange.
Baxley, with his term as AG coming to an end, needed to act. He knew, for the moment, that Cherry might be a bridge too far. The other major suspect, Blanton, had laid low since the bombing. He had stuck to an alibi he constructed in consultation with his then girlfriend, later wife, Jean Barnes, that he left her home at 2:30 a.m. on September 15—after the car was spotted by Kirthus Glenn at the church.
Chambliss’s case was the most promising, though still circumstantial. Even with Elizabeth Cobbs and Ms. Glenn, there was no smoking gun.
Baxley consulted his friend Chris McNair, father of Denise, about the state of the evidence and their chances for success. “I thought it was going to be an uphill battle, but I thought it was worth making the effort,” Baxley said. “Chris said ‘you sure you got the right guy,’ I said ‘yes,’ and he said, ‘well we should go ahead because if you don’t do it, surely nobody else will.’”
Baxley decided he’d prosecute Chambliss for the death of Denise McNair only. If he lost that case, then he could still shoot for a trial for one of the other victims. He knew that double jeopardy might prevent another trial after an acquittal, but it was the strongest plan under the circumstances.
Indeed, there was enough evidence against Chambliss to get what the FBI probably thought impossible in the sixties: a Jefferson County grand jury returned an indictment against Dynamite Bob in October 1977. He would stand trial for the murder of Denise McNair.
Baxley often says that he and I have very different opinions of James Lay, the volunteer worker who saw the Klansmen conducting what was either a failed bombing attempt or a dry run just two weeks before the fatal Sunday. Merely mentioning the man’s name infuriates my old friend, as Lay was less than helpful, even callous, in the countdown to the 1977 trial. However, I got to see a different side to Lay in later life.
Armed with the accounts from Ms. Glenn and evidence of the Chambliss statements from his niece connecting him to the bombing, Baxley knew that the testimony of Lay and radio personality “Tall Paul” White, who had been with Lay that night, would be extremely important. Their accounts reinforced the notion that the same Klansmen identified by Glenn as being at the church in the early hours of September 15 had been targeting the church weeks before. As lawyers would say, that is damn strong circumstantial evidence.
But Lay, a member of the black Civil Defense Unit, steadfastly refused to cooperate with Baxley. There was little doubt he felt threatened by the Klan, but Eddy speculates something else contributed to his reluctance. “He was the kind of fella if you rub him wrong, he ain’t going to help you,” according to Eddy. Baxley, apparently, rubbed him the wrong way.
It wasn’t for want of trying. One morning, Baxley even had Chris McNair cook up a down-home Southern breakfast of eggs, grits, and bacon while they put the hard sell on Lay. “But no and no,” Baxley said, referring to Lay’s refusal to be involved. (White wasn’t as crucial, as he didn’t see the car—his usefulness was as a supporting witness to Lay.)
Decades later, an aged and sick James Lay, perhaps seeking to clear his conscience, would be crucial to my efforts to convict Blanton and Cherry, but Baxley had to try and convince a Southern jury of the unquestionable guilt of Chambliss without that important evidence.
The media and public attention given to the Chambliss trial was extensive. However, rather than resounding calls of “about time” in the rundown to the trial, Baxley was widely denounced for stirring unwanted old memories.
That was lost on me at the time, as I was consumed by the legal process itself. As a law school student and aspiring trial lawyer, the Chambliss prosecution brought a unique opportunity to act on Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas’s advice. I resolved to cut classes to watch a great lawyer in action in what would be the biggest trial ever in the state.
On November 14, 1977, Judge Wallace Gibson gaveled the court to order in State v. Chambliss. Closest to the jury box were Baxley and his prosecution team: George Beck and John Yung. Opposite sat Chambliss and his legal defense, former Mayor Art Hanes, his son Art Jr., and junior associate Mike Bolin.
The jury consisted of nine whites and three blacks.
They heard from police and other witnesses about the events of that night, including the 1:30 a.m. false alarm of a bomb threat at the Holiday Inn, widely believed to be a deliberate effort to distract law enforcement about the time the bomb was placed at the church. Reverend Cross also presented emotional testimony about the bombing scene, and the court heard survivor Sarah Collins’s moving account of how she called out for her sister Addie.
Useful evidence for the prosecution steadily mounted with each witness, though Chambliss displayed little or no emotion, his regular scowl seemingly frozen in place.
Kirthus Glenn, the reluctant witness from Detroit, was obviously nervous as she testified that the FBI had questioned her about the car she had seen in the early morning hours of September 15 and showed her pictures of possible suspects. She assertively identified Chambliss as one of the three people she saw in the car that night and told the court she had done so on three separate occasions during the investigation.
Cobbs’s turn came soon after. She was terrified when Eddy picked her up for the trip to court. “I had to be the bodyguard,” Eddy said. “She could hardly talk. I told her that when she was on the stand to look my way and not to look at [Chambliss].”
The tension was close to unbearable even before she walked into the courtroom, which was in lockdown. Eddy tried to protect her from prying eyes and stayed beside her, but a phone call came in that he had to take before he escorted her in.
On the line was Tee Chambliss. “Are they going to convict him?” she asked Eddy. The investigator had never spoken to Dynamite Bob’s wife before, but she had asked for him by name.
“I believe so,” he said.
Tee was desperate: “Do you really know?”
“No,” Eddy conceded, “but my experience tells me they will.”
The defendant’s wife, who had carefully and dutifully combed his hair before the authorities took him into custody, sighed and said, “Oh, I hope so.”
Inside the court, anticipating Cobbs’s entrance, everyone was looking at Chambliss to witness his reaction to the appearance of his niece.
Eddy rejoined her as she was led in from the back, walled off from the gallery by a bunch of sheriff’s deputies. All eyes in the room, including mine, fixed on this brave thirty-seven-year-old woman who had been twenty-three at the time of the bombing. Chambliss shook his head in disapproval.
John Yung, Baxley’s assistant, handled the questioning. Cobbs stared relentlessly in Eddy’s direction as she answered. She testified that she had been at the Chambliss home on Saturday, September 14, visiting her Aunt Tee, who had been ill.
She said that there had been an incident in the city the night before in which a black youth cut a white woman with a knife. When a report of the assault came on the TV news, Chambliss became enraged, spewing a stream of racial epithets and calling Governor Wallace a coward for not doing anything to stop integration. Chambliss, she said, hollered: “It seems like I’ve been fighting a one-man war since 1942.”
Later her uncle railed that he had enough “stuff” to flatten half of Birmingham before warning ominously: “You wait until after Sunday. They’ll beg us to let them segregate.”
“I asked him what he meant by that,” Cobbs told the court. “He responded, ‘You just wait and see tomorrow.’”
She later testified that about a week after the bombing, Chambliss was watching TV when a news bulletin said that murder charges would be brought against anyone connected to the crime. Chambliss, she said, looked at the TV and solemnly said: “No one was supposed to die.”
Baxley and his team were masterful, linking observations from various witnesses to paint a damning picture of Chambliss. They scrupulously put together the story of how he came to be where Glenn placed him around 2:00 a.m., just hours before the bomb exploded.
The defense team believed that Chambliss’s only chance to beat the charge was to take the witness stand. Arthur Hanes Jr. handled most of the case, along with his father, who was a former FBI agent and former Birmingham mayor. Both father and son were lawyers familiar with controversy, having initially been retained to help defend Martin Luther King Jr. assassin James Earl Ray. They had also worked for several prominent Klan clients.
The defense case focused on calling character witnesses and was built around the defendant’s expected testimony. Dynamite Bob had been eager to tell his side of the story, but as the trial progressed, Chambliss became uneasy about taking the stand. Baxley had scorched some of the defense witnesses on cross-examination, including the old Klansman’s nephew, a Birmingham police officer.
Chambliss was as mesmerized as everyone else in the court by Baxley’s evisceration of the credibility of each defense witness. When Hanes Sr. announced that their last witness would be the defendant, Dynamite Bob’s cowardice took hold. He sat in his seat and wouldn’t move.
As Hanes tried to budge him, Chambliss muttered: “I ain’t going up there.”
Feigning he didn’t hear Chambliss or didn’t understand, Baxley asked, “What did he say? What’d he say?”
“I ain’t going up there,” Chambliss said again, loudly.
At the moment this brief exchange unfolded, it was difficult to see how important it was. But Baxley knew. Had he, as prosecutor, made any reference to the defendant’s refusal to testify on his own behalf it would have been an automatic mistrial. Instead, by repeatedly asking, “What’d he say?” within earshot of the jury, Baxley baited Chambliss into declaring loudly what he was doing—refusing to take the stand.
Judge Gibson gaveled the courtroom into silence and recessed for Hanes Sr. to confer with his client. But pleas to Chambliss to reconsider fell on deaf ears. “I swear at that moment his face shimmered with evil, and I knew this is the most evil, unrepentant son of a bitch I have ever met,” Hanes Jr. told Al.com’s Jon Solomon in 2013.
Indeed, dealing with Chambliss shook the lawyer to his core. His faith in humanity damaged, Art Hanes Jr. opted never to defend a criminal murder case again.
Not only did Baxley’s maneuver effectively collapse the defense’s strategy; it arguably sealed the fate of not just one killer, but three, as history suggests that without a Chambliss conviction, getting the others would have been even harder decades later.
Before closing arguments, Baxley’s assistant Yung drew the AG’s attention to Denise McNair’s death certificate and the date of her birth. As fate would have it, it was Thursday, November 17, Denise McNair’s birthday. She would have been twenty-six years old.
I sat in the balcony, barely moving, locked onto Baxley’s argument. As he laid out photos of each girl taken in the morgue, there was not a dry eye in the house, including mine. It was passionate, sincere, and a loud cry for justice—something to behold and exactly why I skipped classes.
“Today,” Baxley told the jury, “you can give Denise McNair a birthday present. You can bring her killer to justice.” In short order, they did.
When the guilty verdict was read, and Judge Gibson asked Chambliss if he had anything to say, the convicted Klansman said, “I swear to God I didn’t bomb that church.” Dynamite Bob was then sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Denise McNair and led out of the courtroom in handcuffs.
Baxley had achieved what had been perceived as nearly impossible. Yet, in the end, it all felt so obvious. “Cobbs and Ms. Glenn, they were crucial, but the end with Chambliss saying he wouldn’t get up—that was crazy,” Baxley reflected. “It just fell in our lap, and that did as much as anything else [to convict him] because the jury could see he was guilty.”
After the trial, Art Hanes Jr. was given the task of breaking the news to Chambliss’s wife that her husband wouldn’t be coming home. Years later Hanes recounted the scene to Baxley: He arrived at the Chambliss home to find the drapes drawn, the lights out. Tee was lying on a sofa in a dark den with a washcloth on her forehead.
When told that her husband had been convicted and wouldn’t be returning, Tee asked Hanes to repeat himself several times. “Are you sure he won’t ever be coming home?” she asked. Again, the young lawyer said he would not. Suddenly, apparent despair turned to relief, then elation, as Mrs. Chambliss jumped from the sofa, threw the washcloth away, dashed to the windows, opened the drapes, and exclaimed: “Hallelujah, Hallelujah. Thank you, Jesus.”
And thank God for Tee Chambliss, Kirthus Glenn, Elizabeth Cobbs, Bill Baxley, Bob Eddy, and the rest of Baxley’s team.
Immediately after Chambliss was convicted, the prosecution team explored the possibilities of building court-ready cases against Blanton and Cherry, but there was not enough time left in Baxley’s tenure as Attorney General. In the years that followed, the political will wasn’t there to reinspect the festering old wound. The aging former Klansmen once again walked out of the spotlight.
Blanton, who eventually received a law degree but never passed the bar exam, felt safe enough to (again) divorce Jean Casey, his alibi for the night of the bombing. In doing so, he surrendered the protection marriage gave to couples at the time (they did not have an obligation to testify against their partners). Meanwhile, Cherry remained in Texas and continued to talk about himself and who he hated to anyone prepared to listen. He demeaned women and harassed his family. In other words, he continued being his usual obnoxious self.