Four girls killed at church
Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley were killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963. The Justice Department’s history describes the church as both a place of worship for its Black congregation and a meeting place for people organizing nonviolent protests against segregation. The attack struck a community already confronting organized racial violence.
The first murder conviction came in 1977, when Robert Chambliss was tried in Alabama. That verdict answered the charge against him. It took a later investigation to bring the cases against Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry to trial.
Federal investigators and state prosecutors
The FBI reopened the case in 1997. Federal investigators and prosecutors pursued it through a grand jury. The department’s account explains a jurisdictional problem: the federal theory depended on showing that the explosive had traveled in interstate commerce. The investigators could not establish that element.
The investigation still produced material that could help Alabama prosecutors. The Justice Department says it released the grand jury investigation to the state, which used the work as a basis for successful prosecutions. Blanton was convicted in 2001 and Cherry in 2002. The state murder cases and the possible federal explosives case had different elements, which explains why difficulty with one route did not end the other.
Why the chronology matters
A timeline that lists only the bombing and the last conviction hides the work and the wait in between. Start with the four girls and the attack on their church, then add the first conviction, the reopening, the change in prosecution route and the two later verdicts. The Justice Department’s account is especially useful for the handoff between jurisdictions. It shows why investigators can revisit a case, encounter a legal obstacle and still develop a route for the evidence to be heard.