http://www.huffingtonpost.com/earl-ofari-hutchinson/the-racial-ghosts-of-the-_b_3917290.html
The Racial Ghosts of the Birmingham Church Bombing Still Haunt America
09/13/2013
by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Huffington Post
The Racial Ghosts of the Birmingham Church Bombing Still Haunt America
09/13/2013
by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Huffington Post
EARL OFARI HUTCHINSON
(b. 1945)
(b. 1945)
The commemoration of the bombing presents yet another chance for federal
and state prosecutors to permanently close the book on all the nation's
old unsolved racial murders. Without that, the ghosts of that atrocious
past will continue to haunt America.
The Birmingham church bombing that killed four African-American girls fifty years ago was no isolated racial horror. At the time, the Sixteenth Street Baptist church bombing was just another in the decade long train of racist terror attacks that included beatings, shootings, mob attacks, ambushes, and, of course, bombings. Dozens were killed in the attacks. The victims had two things in common. They were either targeted for their civil rights work, or targeted solely out of racial hate and revenge. The other was that in nearly every case their killers were never prosecuted, and in more cases than not, were not even arrested though their identities were often well-known. In several cases, they were known because the FBI had fingered them.
The Birmingham bombing was a near textbook example of how officials turned a blind eye toward murder. The man who actually planted the bomb, Robert Chambliss, was quickly identified. He was arrested but not on murder charges, but simply illegal possession of dynamite. He got a paltry fine and a hand slap six-month sentence. His other three accomplices, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry were also soon identified. They were not arrested. It would take nearly two decades before Chambliss was finally tried and convicted and got a life sentence for the bombing and more than two decades after before Blanton and Cherry (Cash had died) were convicted and got life sentences.
This closed the legal book on this horror. In a few other cases federal prosecutors and D.A.'s in the South were determined to nail the perpetrators of old racial crimes. They scored some notable victories. State prosecutors in Mississippi convicted Byron De La Beckwith in 1994 for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, and former Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers in 1998 for the 1965-firebomb murder of Mississippi NAACP official Vernon Dahmer, and conviction of three Klansmen in the 1964 Birmingham church bombing. For years the murdered men's relatives pressed prosecutors to bring charges against the killers.
While their prosecution and jailing, is commendable, the racial atrocity book still remains wide open on many others. Some of them were well-known and shocking.
• 1959, Mack Charles Parker was seized from a Mississippi jail by a group of armed white men. Parker was accused of raping a white woman. Ten days later Parker's mutilated body was fished out of a river in Louisiana. Within three weeks of the killing, FBI agents identified his killers. They had solid evidence that the murderers had crossed state lines, and that law enforcement officers had conspired with the killers. No state or federal charges were ever brought.
• In 1961, a white Mississippi state representative murdered Herbert Lee, a NAACP worker, on an open highway during a traffic dispute. He was unarmed. No state or federal charges were ever brought.
• In 1965, Jimmy Lee Jackson, a black church deacon was gunned down by an Alabama state trooper following a voting rights protest march and rally in Marion, Ala. Eyewitnesses insisted that Jackson was unarmed and did not threaten the officer. No state or federal charges were ever brought.
According to FBI reports, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a para-military terror squad in Mississippi, committed nine murders between 1960 and 1965. In nearly all cases, FBI agents quickly learned the identities of the suspected killers through Klan informants, or the men's own boasts of the killings. There was only a token effort made to bring them to justice.
Federal prosecutors have, and in fact always have had, the legal weapons to indict the suspected killers. Two federal statutes have long been on the books that give the Justice Department the power to prosecute public officials and law enforcement officers who committed or conspired with others to commit acts of racial violence.
The four children massacred in the Sixteenth Street Baptist church on that nightmarish Sept. 15 day a half-century ago and the other cold case victims were not solely victims of Klan terrorists, hostile local sheriffs, and state officials, but at times of a racially indifferent federal government. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson cautiously and reluctantly pushed the FBI to make arrests and the Justice Department to bring indictments in the murders of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, army major Lemuel Penn in Georgia in 1964, and civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in Alabama in 1965. Even then it took mass outrage and pressure to get legal action against them.
The fiftieth anniversary of the Birmingham church bombing is a reminder of how far the nation has come from its ugly and violent racial past. But at the same time, it also tosses another terrible glare on the period in the South when blacks were murdered with the tacit approval of Southern state officials, and the cold shoulder indifference of the federal government. The commemoration of the bombing presents yet another chance for federal and state prosecutors to permanently close the book on all the nation's old unsolved racial murders. Without that, the ghosts of that atrocious past will continue to haunt America.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and political analyst. Hutchinson is the author of ten books on race and politics in America. His featured interviews and comments on race and politics have appeared in numerous national publications: He is a frequent guest analyst on CNN, Fox, and American Urban Radio Network:
He is the National Political Writer for New America Media and a regular contributor to: the Grio, and Electronic Urban Radio Network. He is the host of The Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network. His latest ebook '47 Percent Negro': A Chronicle of the Wackiest Racial Assaults on President Obama is now available (Amazon).
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earlhutchinson
The Birmingham bombing was a near textbook example of how officials turned a blind eye toward murder. The man who actually planted the bomb, Robert Chambliss, was quickly identified. He was arrested but not on murder charges, but simply illegal possession of dynamite. He got a paltry fine and a hand slap six-month sentence. His other three accomplices, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry were also soon identified. They were not arrested. It would take nearly two decades before Chambliss was finally tried and convicted and got a life sentence for the bombing and more than two decades after before Blanton and Cherry (Cash had died) were convicted and got life sentences.
This closed the legal book on this horror. In a few other cases federal prosecutors and D.A.'s in the South were determined to nail the perpetrators of old racial crimes. They scored some notable victories. State prosecutors in Mississippi convicted Byron De La Beckwith in 1994 for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, and former Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers in 1998 for the 1965-firebomb murder of Mississippi NAACP official Vernon Dahmer, and conviction of three Klansmen in the 1964 Birmingham church bombing. For years the murdered men's relatives pressed prosecutors to bring charges against the killers.
While their prosecution and jailing, is commendable, the racial atrocity book still remains wide open on many others. Some of them were well-known and shocking.
• 1959, Mack Charles Parker was seized from a Mississippi jail by a group of armed white men. Parker was accused of raping a white woman. Ten days later Parker's mutilated body was fished out of a river in Louisiana. Within three weeks of the killing, FBI agents identified his killers. They had solid evidence that the murderers had crossed state lines, and that law enforcement officers had conspired with the killers. No state or federal charges were ever brought.
• In 1961, a white Mississippi state representative murdered Herbert Lee, a NAACP worker, on an open highway during a traffic dispute. He was unarmed. No state or federal charges were ever brought.
• In 1965, Jimmy Lee Jackson, a black church deacon was gunned down by an Alabama state trooper following a voting rights protest march and rally in Marion, Ala. Eyewitnesses insisted that Jackson was unarmed and did not threaten the officer. No state or federal charges were ever brought.
According to FBI reports, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a para-military terror squad in Mississippi, committed nine murders between 1960 and 1965. In nearly all cases, FBI agents quickly learned the identities of the suspected killers through Klan informants, or the men's own boasts of the killings. There was only a token effort made to bring them to justice.
Federal prosecutors have, and in fact always have had, the legal weapons to indict the suspected killers. Two federal statutes have long been on the books that give the Justice Department the power to prosecute public officials and law enforcement officers who committed or conspired with others to commit acts of racial violence.
The four children massacred in the Sixteenth Street Baptist church on that nightmarish Sept. 15 day a half-century ago and the other cold case victims were not solely victims of Klan terrorists, hostile local sheriffs, and state officials, but at times of a racially indifferent federal government. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson cautiously and reluctantly pushed the FBI to make arrests and the Justice Department to bring indictments in the murders of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, army major Lemuel Penn in Georgia in 1964, and civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in Alabama in 1965. Even then it took mass outrage and pressure to get legal action against them.
The fiftieth anniversary of the Birmingham church bombing is a reminder of how far the nation has come from its ugly and violent racial past. But at the same time, it also tosses another terrible glare on the period in the South when blacks were murdered with the tacit approval of Southern state officials, and the cold shoulder indifference of the federal government. The commemoration of the bombing presents yet another chance for federal and state prosecutors to permanently close the book on all the nation's old unsolved racial murders. Without that, the ghosts of that atrocious past will continue to haunt America.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a nationally acclaimed author and political analyst. Hutchinson is the author of ten books on race and politics in America. His featured interviews and comments on race and politics have appeared in numerous national publications: He is a frequent guest analyst on CNN, Fox, and American Urban Radio Network:
He is the National Political Writer for New America Media and a regular contributor to: the Grio, and Electronic Urban Radio Network. He is the host of The Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network. His latest ebook '47 Percent Negro': A Chronicle of the Wackiest Racial Assaults on President Obama is now available (Amazon).
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/earlhutchinson
From left: Denise McNair, 11, Carole Robertson, 14, Addie Mae Collins,
14, and Cynthia Wesley, 14, are shown in photos from 1963, the year they
were killed in the Birmingham church bombing. (AP)
Prosecutor reflects on 50th anniversary of 1963 Birmingham bombing
September 14, 2013
Los Angeles Times
It was 50 years ago this Sunday a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls: Denise McNair, 11, and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14.
Birmingham native G. Douglas Jones befriended the father of one of those girls, and about 40 years later, as a federal prosecutor, he convicted two of the Ku Klux Klan members responsible for the bombing.
Jones, 59, now a private lawyer, spoke with the Los Angeles Times on Friday about his memories of the bombing, the trials that followed and the legacy of the civil rights movement in his hometown.
What is it like in Birmingham today? Do you plan to attend any of the events this weekend marking the anniversary of the bombing?
It’s been a jam-packed couple of weeks. I’ve just been going from one event to the next. It’s a very exciting time—everything seems to be coming together culminating in the church service Sunday afternoon. The Congressional Black Caucus was in town, and I did a panel this morning with [former secretary of State and Birmingham native] Condoleezza Rice and moderated by Gayle King. Bill Cosby is in town for some events, and Spike Lee, who did the movie “Four Little Girls,” he’s going to show that.
It’s a very emotional time, an exciting time—people are really recognizing the significance of what happened in 1963, beginning with the children’s [civil rights] marches and culminating in the deaths of those four children.
What is your memory of the bombing? What was Birmingham like back then?
My personal memory is not what Birmingham was like. I was 9 years old in 1963, a white kid living out in suburbia, and so my life was a very segregated life, a sheltered life. I don’t have any recollections of that day—I knew there was things going on downtown, but I don’t have a recollection of the bombing.
Birmingham was two towns—a black town and a white town. It took me getting into junior high to see things changing. My elementary school was all white, but when I went to the seventh grade I for the first time went to a school that was integrated, and the kids started adapting, trying to work together.
It was years later, in 1977, that Alabama Atty. Gen. Bill Baxley convicted the first Klansman, Robert Chambliss, in connection with the bombing. You were a law student at Samford University outside Birmingham—do you remember that trial?
Baxley, the young attorney general at the time, was one of my heroes. I was a second-year student so I cut classes that week and went and watched Baxley’s argument—it was one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. The history, the power, that the law can change things for good, that public-service lawyers can have an effect on the world around you.
It was 20 years later that you became a federal prosecutor and convicted an additional two suspects, Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry. How did that happen?
To finish the case that Bill had started in the same courtroom where I had watched as a kid was truly an amazing time.
The case got reopened a year or so before I became U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, appointed by Bill Clinton. Obviously, with the history that I had, I also had some personal history with the McNair family that lost their daughter Denise, the case moved to the top priority for me.
I got to know Chris McNair [the girl’s father] when I was in college, through my political work — I was a young college student involved in politics, he was a newly elected member of the Alabama legislature; he actually represented my area. I had known them for a long time.
They were different cases. With Blanton, we repackaged some of the old evidence and presented it. Cherry ran his mouth a lot. He was his own undoing.
What was it like interviewing the victims' families?
We didn’t initially do much interviewing with the families. I didn’t talk to Bill Baxley about the case either, even though we had been friends for years.
The reason was, I didn’t know if we could win the case, if we had the evidence, and I didn’t want to lose my objectivity. I was just afraid that one day, I might have to tell them I couldn’t do it.
So it was towards the end that we really started working with the families, got them prepped for trial. Ms. Robertson, she was like a saint—she died about two months after the Cherry case was over. I still miss her.
How did you get Cherry’s ex-wife, Willadean, to talk?
Ex-wives are always high on the prospective witness list, but nobody could find her.
In the fall of 1998, we decided to take the investigation in a little bit of a different direction and start calling people for the grand jury. It was no secret what we were doing, calling Klansmen to testify, and a reporter from Jackson, Miss., came and did a story about it.
Willadean read that story in a tiny little town in Montana and she called the FBI and said, “I need to come talk to you.” She drove a couple hundred miles to the nearest office. She just introduced us to her brother, who lived with them for a time; he was in Florida. We had a granddaughter who contacted us who was there at the kitchen table with him talking about the bombing at 16th Street Church. She was just an 11-year-old white kid sitting at the table with a Klansman—she was scared.
Cherry would brag about this to people. With the passage of time, he just got kind of empowered that nothing was going to happen.
How was he able to get away with it for so many years?
It was an open secret among friends. It was an open secret among family members. It was not something that people reported to law enforcement. It just took a full opening of the case and good investigative work to track that down.
What was some of the most powerful evidence and testimony you presented?
The most powerful testimony was the surviving victim, Sarah [Jean Collins Rudolph].
In the Blanton case, there was a tape, what was called “the kitchen tape,” an undercover tape made by the FBI who placed a bug under the kitchen sink of Blanton and his then-wife -- she was his girlfriend at the time of the bombing -- where she asks him where he was on the Friday night before the bombing when he stood her up, he broke a date with her. He says it three times, “We had the meeting to make the bomb”—he admitted it three times.
With Cherry, it was his admissions to family and friends. And I never underestimated the lies that he gave to law enforcement over the years.
You have said prosecuting the cases took an emotional toll on you—did it change the way you see Birmingham?
It changed the way I felt about the city for the positive. By the time we prosecuted these cases, all the bad about Birmingham was known—it was documented. But Birmingham had long before tried to not only put this behind us, but celebrate it with the civil rights museum and the renovating of the Birmingham Civil Rights District. It certainly put the city in a better light when juries, black and white, convicted these guys.
It was an emotionally draining case—it would drain you every day. But from that point on, it’s been nothing but uplifting. We’ve lost witnesses, we’ve lost Ms. Robinson, but the fact of the matter is there’s been so much celebration. Even today, 11 years after the fact, people still stop me and thank me for my service. It’s humbling to have been a part of that. To sit there in the halls of Washington, D.C., the other day and see these girls receive a Congressional Gold Medal is humbling.
This year marks a lot of 50th civil rights anniversaries—sad ones like the bombing, but uplifting ones, too, like the March on Washington. You have said you want people to remember the “hatefulness and viciousness” of that era. Why is that important, and what else should they remember?
In the next couple of years you’re going to see more—anniversaries of the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. I especially hope they mark the passage of the Voting Rights Act as it’s being dismantled by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case that came down this year. I believe we’re taking steps back with regards to civil rights. In legislatures across this country, I believe they are suppressing the rights of minorities to vote with voter ID laws and things of that nature.
On Sept. 15, 1963, hate prevailed over everything as four innocent children were killed. Once that happened, I think so much of America’s consciousness woke up and said, “Oh my God--this is not just a question of culture anymore, it’s a question of hate.” When you remember those deaths and the bombing, what you really think back and do is remember the changes and the catalyst. I think it was one of the things that caused Congress to act and caused the American people to start changing their hearts and minds.
This week in Birmingham is called “Empowerment Week,” and it’s because we are not just focusing on the past but on the future. I think that speaks volumes about not just, look at what we’ve done, but what are we doing. We need to continue expanding whether it’s gay rights, rights for the elderly or the disabled. By looking at the mistakes made by society in the past, maybe we won’t make them again.
So where will you be on Sunday?
The U.S. Attorney General [Eric H. Holder Jr.] and I are friends. I’m looking forward to seeing him and his wife on Sunday. [Former Atlanta mayor and congressman] Andrew Young, [civil rights leader] the Rev. Joseph Lowery—it’s just an exciting time.
Initially I will probably go to the church services—the first one is going to truly be a church service; my wife and I will attend. At about 12:30 p.m. I have to do a C-SPAN show live from the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, then at 3 p.m. Birmingham time will be the big memorial where Holder will speak and Young will speak, and then we’ll have the dedication of the statue of the girls.
