Alabama’s parole board has denied Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. release from prison, the one-time Klansman was convicted in a church bombing that killed four black girls.
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Inmates are not allowed to attend parole hearings in Alabama, but opponents of Blanton’s release are expected to address the three-person board when it meets in Montgomery.
Blanton has served 15 years of a life sentence for being part of a group of Klansmen who bombed 16th Street Baptist Church. 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. Blanton was free for more than 30 years before he was convicted of the crime.
It killed four girls; 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris, also known as Cynthia Wesley. The crowd will include Rudolph, who survived injuries including the loss of an eye and testified against Blanton at his trial.
“Because he has never shown any remorse whatsoever for taking the lives of those innocent little girls, justice can only be served if Thomas Blanton spends the rest of his life in prison”, odd continued.
Lisa McNair, younger sister of Denise McNair, spoke of a “legacy of pain”, and Edwina Robertson Braddock, sister of Carole Robertson, said it would be ‘travesty” to release Blanton.
Blanton is held in the St. Clair Correctional Facility near Birmingham, where he is serving four back-to-back life sentences.
“Whether it’s racial issues, whether it’s gender issues, whether it is terrorist activity similar to what Mr. Blanton perpetrated in 1963, the message is we have to stop the hate and we will punish those who kill or maim in the name of hate”, Jones said. Under Alabama law he will next be up for parole in 2021. They decided against parole after hearing the opposition and conferring briefly. The current pastor of the 16th Street Baptist Church plans to attend the hearing. He was the federal prosecutor who tried and convicted Blanton and another Klansman after the FBI reopened the case in the 1990s.
Their deaths inside a church on a Sunday morning became a symbol worldwide of the depth of racial hatred in America’s segregated South. His parole denied today.
It is unknown if Blanton had an attorney representing him for Wednesday’s parole board hearing.
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The men convicted of the murders – Bobby Frank Cherry, Robert Chambliss and Thomas Blanton – deserved the harsh punishment they received.
