The Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles has denied parole to a 86-year-old Ku Klux Klansman who was convicted of killing four African American girls more than 50 years ago.
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“Justice was finally served in 2001 in the case of Thomas Blanton”.
Her mother, Alpha Robertson, lived to see the conviction of the three Klansmen charged in the bombing. The two-member board heard from the family members of the young girls killed in the fiery blast – Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Denise McNair.
Dozens of people showed up in Montgomery for the hearing wearing ribbons that read “Keep Thomas Blanton behind bars”.
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. Speaking in opposition to the parole, Lisa McNair, the younger sister of victim Denise McNair, said her family has had to endure a “legacy of pain” as a result of the bombing.
DOUG JONES: He killed four children on a Sunday morning – innocent kids – you know, trying to achieve a political goal of maintaining a basically immoral way of life – the segregated South. “The message is that we have to stop the hate, and we will punish those who kill or maim in the name of hate”, Jones said.
August 3, 2016 – Thomas Blanton, the last living convicted bomber, is denied parole. In Alabama, inmates do not attend such hearings. No one spoke on behalf of his release.
The NAACP plans to travel by bus to oppose Blanton’s parole.
The board ordinarily has three members but there’s a vacancy.
Doug Jones, a former U.S. lawyer 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 that Birmingham’s public schools were facing a court order to desegregate.
Blanton is up for parole again in five years.
“It took (38) years for him to be brought to justice to begin with”, Jones said. He was the federal prosecutor who tried and convicted Blanton and another Klansman after the FBI reopened the case in the 1990s.
September 26, 1977 – Robert Chambliss, 73, a retired auto mechanic and former Ku Klux Klan member, is indicted by a Jefferson County grand jury on four counts of first-degree murder.
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.
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Rev. Price says, “what Mr. Blanton meant for evil, God, in His sovereignty, turned it for good”.
