Subject: Lyr Add: BIRMINGHAM SUNDAY (Richard Farina)
From:
catspaw49
Date: 23 May 02 - 11:10 AM
In 1964 Richard Farina wrote Birmingham Sunday about the church bombing in Birmingham that killed 4 little girls and changed the progress of the Civil Rights Movement. The four children killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, was bombed on September 15, 1963 were Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley. After nearly 40 years, justice has been done......finally.
FROM THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Birmingham, Ala. -- When the crime was committed, when four girls lay blasted to death in the shattered basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church, Bobby Frank Cherry was young and strong and confident that his world, one of white robes and closed minds, would turn forever.
On Wednesday afternoon, more than 38 years after his bomb shook the church in the most shameful act of the civil rights era, he stood old, angry and puzzled as a mostly white jury sent him to prison for the rest of his life for the thing he had once laughed about in the company of like-minded men.
"I know one thing," said Sarah Collins Rudolph, who was 12 years old when the explosion pierced her right eye with projectiles of glass and killed her sister, Addie Mae Collins. "It was a long time."
A Jefferson County jury of nine whites and three blacks found the 71- year-old former Klansman guilty of the murders of Addie Mae, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, bringing to justice the last living suspect in the Sept. 15, 1963, bombing, and closing the door on a crime that has haunted Birmingham for four decades.
As the jury's forewoman, a middle-aged white woman, read the verdict, ticking off the word "guilty" four times for each one of the victims, Cherry stood motionless, a tiny U.S. flag stuck in his lapel.
TRAGEDY PROMPTED CHANGE
This was a historic crime, but one that did exactly the opposite of what the bombers hoped it would do. Instead of forcing black leaders, through terror, to beg for segregation, it shamed and sickened white citizens.
"This tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience," the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted at the girls' funeral.
The South did change, but the killers of the girls hid for decades inside a brittle silence that cracked only when they boasted of their involvement in a moment of indiscretion with kin and people they believed held the same hatred. It was largely that boasting, recounted by the prosecution's witnesses, that convicted them all.
Judge James Garrett had warned the audience in the courtroom, a cold, modern, prefabricated building barely big enough to hold the crowd, that he would lock up anyone who exhibited "an emotional outcry." But as the forewoman read the verdicts, not by each victim's name but by a sterile case number, some black members of the audience began to cry and quietly mouth words of faith.
"Praise God, praise God," said one woman, in the sixth pew. "Thank you, Jesus."
Just one row behind her, Cherry's 20-year-old grandson, Glenn Belcher, cried with his hands around his head. Myrtle Cherry, Cherry's wife, held him with one arm across his shoulders.
Each guilty verdict carries an automatic life sentence, under the state law in place at the time of the bombing. The murder convictions carry an automatic appeal.
"Thank God, today you can say Birmingham is rising out of the dust," said the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who was beaten by Cherry with brass knuckles when he tried to enroll his own children in an all-white Birmingham school in 1957.
Cherry's conviction, after deliberations of more than six hours, brings to a close an often-flawed and often-abandoned investigation into the bombing that -- despite gaps of decades in its progress -- has finally brought to justice all the men linked to the bombing who did not die before cases could be made.
Robert Chambliss, nicknamed "Dynamite Bob" because he was linked to so many of the more than 40 blasts that terrorized black citizens in the South during the civil rights era, was convicted in 1977 and died in prison. Herman Frank Cash, whose family ran a barbecue restaurant that became a hangout for Klansmen, died untried. Thomas Blanton Jr., who once laughed with Cherry about the bombing on an FBI surveillance tape, was convicted last year and also has been sentenced to life in prison.
None of them ever broke under FBI pressure to name the others, and none of them ever confessed.
'I DIDN'T DO ANYTHING'
As bailiffs took out their handcuffs to take Cherry away to begin serving his sentence, Cherry said he was innocent and the victim of a campaign of lies.
When Garrett asked him whether he had anything to say, he motioned to the prosecutors.
"This whole bunch have lied all through this thing," Cherry said. "I've told the truth. I don't know why I'm going to jail for nothing."
Just feet away, the surviving family members of his victims sat in a single row of metal folding chairs, all dry-eyed, outwardly impassive. It was as if they were determined to send Cherry into the bleakness of his future without letting him see even one more glimpse of the pain that he had caused.
"I didn't do anything," Cherry said, again. A bailiff locked a set of handcuffs on Cherry's wrists, with a loud, ratcheting sound. "Good luck," Garrett said.
Cherry vanished through a side door and, as far as many of his victims are concerned, into a dark place in history. But at least, they said, it is now history.
©2002 San Francisco Chronicle Page A - 1
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Birmingham Sunday...Richard Farina (also in the DT)
Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
That cold autumn morning no eyes saw the sun,
And Addie Mae Collins, her number was one.
At an old Baptist church there was no need to run.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The clouds they were grey and the autumn winds blew,
And Denise McNair brought the number to two.
The falcon of death was a creature they knew,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom,
The church it was crowded, but no one could see
That Cynthia Wesley's dark number was three.
Her prayers and her feelings would shame you and me.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
Young Carol Robertson entered the door
And the number her killers had given was four.
She asked for a blessing but asked for no more,
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
On Birmingham Sunday a noise shook the ground.
And people all over the earth turned around.
For no one recalled a more cowardly sound.
And the choirs kept singing of Freedom.
The men in the forest they once asked of me,
How many black berries grew in the Blue Sea.
And I asked them right with a tear in my eye.
How many dark ships in the forest?
The Sunday has come and the Sunday has gone.
And I can't do much more than to sing you a song.
I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.
And the choirs keep singing of Freedom.
Amen......finally......
Spaw
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