16th Street Baptist Church Bombing Victims

Case background and investigation

On the morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, a dynamite bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in downtown Birmingham, Alabama. The FBI places the blast at about 10:24 a.m., in a back stairwell of the building. It killed four girls who were in a basement room on the other side of the wall: Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, and Carol Denise McNair, 11. More than 20 other people were injured, among them Addie Mae's sister Sarah, who lost an eye.

The church was the largest Black congregation in the city and a central meeting place for the civil rights movement, and it had received bomb threats before. According to the National Park Service, more than 8,000 people attended the funeral service for the girls, and the attack drew national and international attention to the violence surrounding desegregation in Birmingham.

The FBI states that dozens of agents worked the case and that by 1965 the bureau had identified four suspects, all Klan members: Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash and Thomas E. Blanton Jr. No federal charges were brought in the 1960s. The bureau's own account attributes this to reluctant witnesses, a lack of physical evidence and surveillance material that was then inadmissible. Other accounts, including The New York Times, say FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover blocked efforts by the Birmingham office to bring charges, a claim the FBI disputes.

Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the case in the 1970s. On November 18, 1977, a jury convicted Chambliss of the murder of Denise McNair, and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in 1985. Herman Cash died in 1994 without ever being charged.

The FBI reopened its investigation in the mid-1990s, and Blanton and Cherry were indicted in May 2000. Blanton was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder on May 1, 2001, and received four life sentences. Cherry was convicted of the same charges on May 22, 2002, after a trial in which, The Guardian reported, members of his own family testified that he had boasted of taking part. He denied involvement. Cherry died in prison in November 2004. Blanton was denied parole in 2016 and died on June 26, 2020, at age 82, at the Donaldson Correctional Facility in Bessemer, Alabama, according to The New York Times. He was the last survivor of the three men convicted.