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, Alabama. 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 September 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 an author and political analyst. He
is a frequent MSNBC contributor. He is an associate editor of New America
Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio
Network. He is the host of the weekly 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:
http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson
