Two charged for 1960s race bomb

For nearly 40 years, Birmingham, Alabama, has lived with the restless phantoms of four black girls who were murdered in a church bombing by the Ku Klux Klan at the height of the civil rights struggle. Yesterday the city took a belated step towards putting those ghosts to rest when two of the bomb suspects were charged.

Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry, who surrendered to the Jefferson county sheriff's department yesterday, were members of the Cahaba Boys, a particularly vicious splinter group which believed that the mainstream KKK was not radical enough. The gang was suspected of a string of bombings of black businesses and the flogging of countless unfortunate black people as it rampaged across Birmingham in the early 1960s.

Gang members went looking for victims armed with foot-long chains, battery cables and baseball bats filled with lead. They singled out black travellers on public buses whom they judged to be sitting too close to white passengers.

But the bomb which exploded in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15 1963, killing the four young girls as they prepared for a Sunday service, shocked a state inured to segregation and the klan's casual brutality. The atrocity began to turn the tide in southern white opinion and gave the civil rights movement fresh impetus.

"It was very shocking. It was a very dark hour, a dark period for the civil rights movement," said John Lewis, who was then a leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and is now a Georgia congressman. "We made a commitment that we would do whatever we could to continue the struggle to end discrimination and racial segregation, in the name of these little girls."

The Cahaba Boys (named after a sluggish Alabama river on whose banks the gang used to meet) immediately fell under suspicion, and FBI investigators soon reported to their boss, J Edgar Hoover, that it was "apparent" that the bombing was the work of at least four suspects: Robert Chambliss, Mr Cherry, Herman Cash and Mr Blanton. But even with testimony from klan informants and family members of the suspects, Hoover shelved the case on the grounds that it would not be upheld by an all-white southern jury.

The inquiry, however, was reopened in the 1970s when Chambliss, the gang's leader, was convicted of the murder. He died in prison in 1985. But investigators were sure other gang members were involved.

The horror of the crime ensured that it would not be forgotten. Survivors said that Denise Mcnair, 11, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, all 14, had just left Sunday school and were standing in front of a mirror, adjusting their white dresses and combing their hair, before the service.

The 11 sticks of dynamite planted in the church the night before killed them instantly and broke a stained glass window portraying Jesus surrounded by children. The blast knocked out Christ's face.

The funeral drew 8,000 people. In his eulogy, Martin Luther King said the girls were heroines of a holy crusade. A civil rights institute now stands opposite the church, which remains an icon of the movement.

The bombing is only one of a series of unsolved or partially solved racial killings being re-examined as a changing South finally summons up the courage to confront its ugly past.

In Mississippi, state prosecutors are examining FBI documents on the 1964 murders of three civil rights activists by klansmen who buried the bodies under a dam - a case portrayed in the film Mississippi Burning.

The FBI reopened the Birmingham church bombing case in 1997, focusing on the remaining members of the Cahaba Boys gang. By then, Cash had died.

Mr Cherry had moved to the backwoods of Texas, where he lived a reclusive life only a few hundred yards from his son Thomas, who voiced doubts about his innocence. The two have not talked to each other for more than a year.

Before his indictment yesterday for the 1963 bombing, Mr Cherry was out on bail after being jailed earlier this month for molesting his stepdaughter 29 years ago.

Mr Blanton, 61, worked as a sewer cleaner in the town of Fultondale for much of his life. His lawyer, David Luker, said he had not personally seen the charge but added: "Obviously, it's for murder". He said his client maintained his innocence, and the lawyer would be asking for the former klansman to be released on bail.

Penny Weaver, of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, said she hoped Mr Blanton's arrest would lead Birmingham one step closer to coming to terms with its past.

"A good portion of us are happy to feel that the perpetrators will come to justice, even if it is nearly 40 years later," she said yesterday.

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