A Reckoning for an Infamy

Terrorizing a community was exactly the intention of Bobby Frank Cherry and the other Ku Klux Klansmen who planted the dynamite that went off that Sunday morning in 1963. They and other racist extremists thought that after enough bombs, enough burned churches, enough murdered activists, no one would be brave enough to keep battling for racial equality in the segregated South.

How completely they misjudged the nation’s reaction to the deaths of four black girls preparing for choir in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala.

It took Congress a relatively scant two years to deliver justice in the form of federal civil rights and voting rights laws. But to the nation’s shame, it took almost four decades to deliver a more personal justice.

On Wednesday a jury in Birmingham convicted Cherry of first-degree murder for the deaths of Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair, the first three forever 14, the last only 11.

Cherry, now 71, wasn’t hiding in a cave all these years. He was living openly in Alabama and then Texas--and boasting about his role in the deadliest single act of infamy in the civil rights era.

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI identified Cherry and three other prime suspects within days of the bombing but brought no charges. If the years that Cherry and the others lived freely say all too much about the nation’s history, the perseverance of those who at last brought him to trial offers more optimism for the future.

Former Alabama Atty. Gen. Bill Baxley, who as a law student wrote down the four girls’ names so that he would never forget, reopened the case in 1970 and convicted Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss of murder in 1977. Chambliss died in prison.

Another main suspect, Herman Cash, died in 1984 without being charged. Thomas Blanton Jr. was convicted and sentenced last year to life in prison.

Putting Cherry in prison, even now, sends a message to many places, ranging from the murdered girls’ families to the history books. The only thing worse than having let him go free this long would have been to let his role in this infamous act of evil stand.