Robert Chambliss, convicted in 1977, and Bobby Frank Cherry, who was convicted in the bombing in 2002, have both died in prison.īlanton and Cherry were indicted in 2000 after the FBI reopened an investigation of the bombing.
Howell Raines, local authorities briefly reopened the. Long a suspect in the case, Blanton was the second of three people convicted in the bombing. In response to a New York Times Magazine article by Birmingham native. Their deaths inside a church on a Sunday morning became a symbol worldwide of the depth of racial hatred in the segregated south.ĭoug Jones, a former US attorney who prosecuted Blanton on the state charge, had previously said Blanton should not be released since he has never accepted responsibility for the bombing or expressed any remorse for a crime that was aimed at maintaining racial separation at a time when Birmingham’s public schools were facing a court order to desegregate. The girls, who were inside the church preparing for worship, died instantly in a hail of bricks and stone that seriously injured Collins’ sister, Sarah Collins Rudolph. The blast killed 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris, also known as Cynthia Wesley. Blanton is the last surviving KKK member convicted of murder in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist church.īlanton was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 for being part of a group of Klansmen who planted a dynamite bomb that exploded outside the church on 15 September 1963.
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