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American Morning
Klansman Set for Trial in 37-Year-Old Church Bombing
Aired April 16, 2001 - 09:34 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "4 LITTLE GIRLS)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I was one of the Sunday school teachers. And I think I was the last person in the family to see Denise that morning.
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: Birmingham is a symbol of hardcore resistance to integration. It is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Questions that I will probably always have is that, at that time, I elected not to see my sister. I wanted to remember her.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
LEON HARRIS, CNN ANCHOR: It was one of the darkest moments in the civil rights movement: the bombing of a Birmingham church, which claimed the lives of four girls, their stories, told by the victims' families, were chronicled in a 1997 Spike Lee documentary, some of which you see here.
Nearly 38 years since that tragedy, many of the wounds have not yet healed. And today the case is once again at center stage, as trial opens for one of the suspects.
CNN's Brian Cabell has the story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BRIAN CABELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Sunday morning, September 15, 1963: The scene was horrific. Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church had been bombed. Four girls, three of them 14, one 11, were killed in the explosion as they prepared for the church service.
REV. ABRAHAM LINCOLN WOODS, CIVIL RIGHTS LEADER: And I felt a sickness in my stomach.
CABELL: Reverend Abraham Lincoln Woods, a civil rights leader at the time, remembers the anger he felt as he gazed at the rubble of the church.
WOODS: If these terrorists, if these -- these fanatics wanted to kill somebody, why didn't they single out those of us who were actively involved in the civil rights struggle?
CABELL: It was perhaps the most dastardly act in the entire civil rights era. It came at a time when Alabama Governor George Wallace was railing against integration.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, SEPTEMBER 15, 1963)
GOV. GEORGE WALLACE, ALABAMA: I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
CABELL: It was a time when the Ku Klux Klan demonstrated and terrorized publicly and proudly, when the Birmingham police chief, Bull Connor, turned his dogs and his hoses on civil rights protesters.
Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was the protest headquarters. Even children were involved in the demonstrations. Many were arrested.
Fourteen years after the bombing, Ku Klux Klansman Robert Chambliss was convicted of murder in the bombing. He died in prison in 1985. Another suspect died before he was charged.
That leaves two suspects, fellow Klansmen Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, still alive. They were to be tried together, but a judge last week ruled that the 71-year-old Cherry was not mentally competent to assist his attorneys and might never be tried.
Only Blanton now faces trial for the bombing. Authorities say, in the trial, they'll produce audiotapes from a hidden microphone in Blanton's home in 1964. They reportedly also have a mystery witness and others who will implicate Blanton. Times, they say, have changed in Birmingham.
FRANK SIKORA, AUTHOR: I don't think the people fear that if they get up there that they'll -- somebody's going come and to burn a cross in their front yard and try to blow their house up.
CABELL: Sixteenth Street Baptist Church is thriving today. Times are more peaceful. But the sense of injustice in a town once called "Bombingham" lingers.
WOODS: Justice seem to be mighty slow. Even after 37 years, this case seems to be moving very slowly.
CABELL: Thomas Blanton's trial is expected to last several weeks.
Brian Cabell, CNN.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
HARRIS: Our next guest has investigated and written about this bombing -- the title of her book: "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution." Author Diane McWhorter's articles on race, politics and culture have also appeared in "The New York Times, " "USA Today" and the "Washington Post."
And she is a Birmingham native, now living in New York. She appears with us this morning in our New York bureau.
Good to see you. Thanks for coming in this morning.
If -- I want to begin my asking you something that I just heard mentioned in the report that we just saw there. Why is it that the Klan would target the church, as opposed to going after the leaders of the civil rights movement, who were making the most noise at the time?
DIANE MCWHORTER, AUTHOR: Well, the 16th Street Baptist Church had actually become the sort of the -- known as the headquarters of the movement. It was there during the great demonstrations of 1963 -- earlier that spring, that the marchers gathered and clapped and sang until they caught the nonviolent spirit to go and face the dogs and hoses of the Birmingham police.
So, ironically, the church itself was not that supportive of the movement, it was the bastion of the black bourgeoisie. And they did not really approve of crusades for freedom such as Dr King was leading. But as it turned out, it had a large sanctuary and it was centrally located. So it became known as the staging ground for the movement.
HARRIS: See, you just touched on something that I discovered in your writings. You have come across a few angles that perhaps people have not really heard about before. In fact -- talk about this schism that broke out between Martin Luther King and Reverend Shuttlesworth there in Birmingham.
Apparently, the blacks there weren't even on the same page when it came to the rights movement there?
MCWHORTER: Right. Well, the middle-class blacks were very reluctant to risk what they had -- the gains that they had made within the system of segregation, so they weren't really willing to sign on with King until it became clear that he was going to win, and if they didn't, then they would risk losing everything because they would be on the losing side.
HARRIS: Let me ask you something. In your writing, it appears as though you believe that the Klan basically owned Birmingham?
MCWHORTER: Well, what I document is that, rather than being this rogue group of terrorists -- the polite white people like to call them "rednecks" who had gotten out of control -- they had really been nurtured and sponsored by the city establishment, including City Hall, the Klan, and the business community, for decades leading up to this.
Now, at the time of the bombing itself, they had been cut loose from the polite institutions. But this was the inevitable outcome of decades of collaboration between all these various civic institutions.
HARRIS: And what have you learned about your own family in your searching through the history of these different institutions? I understand that you came across -- you had questions all along about your father, as I understand it.
MCWHORTER: I did. I grew up in a very sheltered, sort of private-school environment. And my father was kind of the renegade of his family. And I really feared that he might be involved with the Klan, because he would leave the house at night to go to what he called "civil rights meetings." And he was doing something to try stop the civil rights movement. And part of my motive for writing the book was to figure out what he was doing.
HARRIS: And what did that do for you?
MCWHORTER: What did that do for me?
HARRIS: Yes.
MCWHORTER: Well, you know what, it made me understand that he really wasn't an aberration after all. That he really reflected the values. His more outspoken bigotry really respected the values of the culture and just in the way that the Ku Klux Klan reflected the values of the community at large.
HARRIS: Now, you say that this trial that's about to open in Birmingham represents this city's last chance at coming to the grips and settling this whole matter. Did any new information surface to make this thing come up at this particular time?
MCWHORTER: No, the evidence has been fairly consistent. What did happen is that the defendants talked more as the years passed. So most of the evidence against them is self-incriminating statements they made to third parties. There's really been no new evidence in the course -- in the long course of this investigation, because no one involved in the case has ever really come forward and said what happened. And we may really never know what happened.
HARRIS: You know, interestingly, there's some racial issues right now taking place in the city of Cincinnati. I found that, in your writings, there's even a link with that city in Birmingham now. And I understand the Reverend Shuttlesworth actually lives in Cincinnati now.
MCWHORTER: That's right. That's right. Reverend Shuttlesworth moved there in the 60's to take over a church.
And I find that, interestingly enough, that police brutality, which is the issue here -- police brutality against minorities is the most persistent vestige of the system of state-sponsored racism that was supposedly overthrown in Birmingham in 1963. But it remains evident in the systematic discrimination against minorities among policemen.
HARRIS: Diane McWhorter, the book is "Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama: The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution." Nice job. And thanks for coming in.
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