September 15, 1963 – Four girls are killed and 14 injured in a bomb blast at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.
Advertisement
Dozens of people showed up in Montgomery for the hearing wearing ribbons that read “Keep Thomas Blanton behind bars”.
Braddock said it would be a “travesty of justice” for the board to release Blanton from prison and “exonerate” him from serving his life sentence (s).
The girls were inside the church preparing for worship when the bomb went off, sending stone and brick flying.
There was standing room only for the hearing, which included testimony from relatives of the girls who were killed, as well as the former U.S. Attorney who prosecuted Blanton.
In 2008, during an interview on NPR, Chris McNair recalled seeing his daughter’s body on the day that shocked the nation.
MCNAIR: Particularly since we have found that he has not had any remorse. “And Denise was lying out there with a piece of mortar, it looked like a rock, mashed in her head”.
May 16, 2000 – A grand jury in Alabama indicts former Klansmen Bobby Frank Cherry and Thomas Blanton with eight counts each of first-degree murder – four counts of intentional murder and four of murder with universal malice.
“Dynamite” Bob Chambliss was convicted in 1977 and died in prison in 1985.
Baxley contended that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which had informants in the Klan in the 1960s and wiretaps on klansmen, wouldn’t share the information that would allow him to build a case against Blanton, Cherry and Cash. Jones, the USA attorney for the Northern District of Alabama during the Clinton administration, made it a personal crusade. Herman Frank Cash died in 1994 without facing charges. A jury of four African-Americans and eight whites indicted the former Klansman on four counts of first-degree murder, almost four decades after the tragedy, Atlanta Black Star reports.
Arthur Price, current pastor of the church, noted the church earned an iconic place in the civil rights movement in May 1963, when a children’s march for peace ended with fire hoses and police dogs ordered by Bull Connor, Birmingham police commissioner.
Blanton is held in the St. Clair Correctional Facility near Birmingham, where he is serving four back-to-back life sentences.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. has been in jail since he was convicted in 2001, more than three decades after his crime.
Blanton was not present for the parole hearing and no one spoke on his behalf. Blanton will be eligible for another hearing in five years.
Advertisement
“After 15 years we are talking about parole”. “There are more people of good will then there are of ill will”, he said.
