THE BIRMINGHAM BOMBING

SUNDAY, SEPT. 15, 1963, at 10:19 A.M. in Birmingham, Ala., a dynamite bomb exploded during services at the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls in a dressing room in the basement. In the number of people killed at a single stroke, the bombing was the most terrible incident of racial violence during the peak years of the Southern civil-rights movement. In the mindlessness of its evil, the 16th Street bombing was also the most heinous act of the era. Even the murders of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 and the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 had a rationale: The victims were participants in what they hoped, but did not fully expect, would be a nonviolent war. But Denise McNair, 11, and Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, all 14, had not even been among the thousands of Birmingham students who flooded into the streets in May to join the famous ”children’s crusade” that Dr. King used to dramatize the brutality of the police tactics there. The children were killed simply because they attended church on the wrong day.

Three months earlier, the 16th Street church had been headquarters for the historic civil-rights marches led by Dr. King. His victory over the segregationist forces led by Gov. George C. Wallace and Birmingham Police Commissioner T. Eugene (Bull) Connor established him as the leading spokesman for black America, and it legitimized the civil-rights movement as a major political power of the 1960’s. By these standards, the events in Birmingham represent one of the triumphant moments in American social history.

These events were also a turning point for the city of Birmingham and many of us who lived there. Dr. King’s demonstrations and boycotts, by shutting down the city’s business district, showed that segregation was impractical. The deaths of the children galvanized the consciences of many Southern whites and forced them to admit segregation was also immoral. On the day that the 16th Street Baptist Church was bombed, I was a student at an all-white Methodist college located 24 blocks from the church. For us, it was an incident that exposed the madness of racism and illustrated the moral paralysis with which it had afflicted us.

In the years that followed, the 16th Street church case would become one of the enduring interests of my career as a reporter. Over and over, I kept returning to the crime and its aftermath, picking up scraps of information that whetted my appetite to know the whole story. In part, my interest sprang from a need to acknowledge, as so few whites in Birmingham did in 1963, the sacrificial suffering of the children. Also, as the years passed, I became friendly with some of the children’s parents and, when I became a parent myself, I came to understand the enormity of their loss. Yet there was something else that kept driving me to unravel the entire tangled history of 16th Street. Through discovering what happened there – how the bomb was planted, how state and Federal officials botched the investigations and why to this day the punishment of the people the police say were involved remains delayed and incomplete – I would be able to confront the hidden, nightmarish side of the city of my childhood.

The legal milestone in the 16th Street case was the conviction on Nov. 18, 1977, of Robert E. Chambliss, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, for first-degree murder. But because Chambliss was only one of several suspects publicly identified by Alabama authorities, his trial merely opened the door to more questions for anyone who wanted to know the full story. What, for example, were the gaps in the evidence that prevented charges from being brought against Chambliss’s associates?

So, between the Chambliss trial and a final trip to Alabama this spring, I interviewed confidential sources and collected the documents from the Justice Department, Federal Bureau of Investigation and state and city police on which this article is based. In the narrative that follows, the most complete account of the investigation yet, there are several key points, as well as little-known or previously unreported facts, to keep in mind:

Official bungling, most notably on the part of F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover, was responsible for hamstringing the local, state and Federal investigators who were close to solving the murders shortly after they occurred.Although Alabama and Federal authorities regard the case as ”inactive” because of insufficient evidence, the investigators and former prosecutors most familiar with the case assert that new evidence could still be developed that would allow additional prosecutions. The case against Chambliss and the elaborate investigative scenario on which it was based were built on information from a small secret network of women with Klan ties. This network of female informants began supplying information to local authorities on the very day the church was bombed, but not even F.B.I. agents who later received the same information were aware of the fact, reported here for the first time, that much of that information originated from Chambliss’s wife. Finally, the story of 16th Street is sprinkled with tragic mighthave-beens. There is information that an intimate relationship between a detective and one of the female Klan informants may have prevented the police from learning about the bomb in time to evacuate the church.

Since that Sunday 20 years ago, much has changed in Birmingham. A black Mayor, Richard Arrington, now sits in City Hall. A former New York City detective, Arthur V. Deutcsh, runs the police department that, under Connor, was riddled with Klan sympathizers.

But to understand the crime that took place two decades ago, it is necessary to reconstruct a picture of a city where racial terrorism was routine, a city with a police tradition of tolerance for the Klan.

Perhaps the best way to describe the Birmingham that produced the 16th Street bombing is to begin with Jack Cash’s Barbecue, a place in my childhood neighborhood where black people were forbidden, by law and by logic, to enter. The ”White Only” sign on the front door and the billy club Jack Cash kept by the cash register to enforce its message were common sights in those days. It also did not seem odd that the proprietor could be notorious for his hatred of blacks and, at the same time, pass out sandwiches and Cokes to my teammates and me when our Y.M.C.A. baseball team won the city championship. For there seemed to be two of everything in Birmingham in those days.

Just as there were two Jack Cashes -the suspected Klansman whose name turned up in F.B.I. files and the kindly proprietor who treated kids – there were two crowds that patronized his place. By day, Jack’s was frequented by neighborhood businessmen like my father and uncles. By night, it was a Ku Klux Klan hangout.

Birmingham had, of course, two citizenries, the white and the black, and two methods of maintaining segregation between them – legal and ad hoc. At Jack’s, the practitioners of these two enforcement methods often crossed paths, for it was a police haunt, too, with a police-band radio set up in a back booth so patrolmen could listen to calls while having coffee. Their joint use of Jack’s symbolized the accommodation that existed between the police and the Klan.

Over the course of 15 years, about 50 dynamite bombs went off on ”Dynamite Hill,” a white residential section a couple of miles from my neighborhood where blacks were buying homes. The police were never able to make any arrests, even though the home of Arthur D. Shores, the city’s most prominent black attorney, was bombed so often that he used to stand guard on his front porch with a shotgun, and even though one of Jack Cash’s customers, Robert E. Chambliss, went by the nickname of ”Dynamite Bob.”

Like most middle-class white children in Birmingham, I grew up as oblivious as a sleepwalker to the duality of certain places and people in that city. Years later, when I became a reporter and saw familiar names and places in the investigative reports, I felt embarrassed by my innocence. But the vanished world that I observed through a child’s eyes at Jack’s taught me things that were fundamental to understanding the racial killings in Birmingham and throughout the South during the 1960’s. Most of these crimes were committed by people who were capable of turning bland, everyday faces to the honest world.

So it was with the Klansmen who made Birmingham into ”Bombingham.” They were obscure, hard-handed sons of the redneck South. Most of them were unskilled laborers or truck drivers, although a few were small-businessmen, auto mechanics, barbers and the like. They were poorly educated, and many had minor arrest records for fighting or carrying guns or trafficking in illegal whisky or drinking too much of it. From their interviews with the F.B.I., it is obvious that many of them joined the Klan as a kind of social club so that, under the guise of protecting the white race, they could get away from their wives and hell around at night.

But some wanted to do more than raise hell and drink beer at Jack’s. Most of that lot belonged to Eastview 13 Klavern, probably the most violent urban Klan unit in the Deep South in this century.Eastview’s members were involved in practically every major incident of racial violence in Alabama, from the beating of the Freedom Riders in 1961 to the murder of a white Detroit activist, Viola Gregg Liuzzo, at the time of the Selma march in 1965. More than the Chamber of Commerce or any other civic institution, the 60 or so members of Eastview 13 shaped Birmingham’s national reputation in the 1950’s and 60’s, and more than any other individual, Dynamite Bob Chambliss, 59 years old at the time of the 16th Street bombing, set the tone for the Klavern.

According to F.B.I. files, the circle of Klansmen close to Chambliss, a truck driver for an auto-parts company, included: Thomas E. Blanton Jr., a 25-year-old high-school dropout and the son of Chambliss’s close friend, a well-known segregationist named Thomas (Pop) E. Blanton.Bobby Frank Cherry, a 35-year-old former Marine and a friend of the younger Blanton. Herman Frank Cash, who sometimes helped his brother Jack at the barbecue place.

Most were linked to the Cahaba River group, a breakaway Klan clique that had decided Eastview 13 had gone soft, and had begun to hold rump sessions under a bridge on the outskirts of Birmingham.

They and other Klansmen were well known to police through all the years of ”unsolved” bombings leading up to 16th Street. F.B.I. records show that the bureau took police-Klan collusion as an accepted fact during those years. As for Chambliss, even after voters turned Connor out in 1963, he remained a familiar figure around City Hall, where he liked to drop in on the police muster room. So it was not unusual that, on the day the 16th Street church was bombed, David Vann would know Chambliss on sight. Vann was an aide to the new Mayor, Albert Boutwell, who had replaced Connor and his crowd at City Hall. Because his specific assignment was to work out the peaceful desegregation of the city, Vann, who would later be elected Mayor himself, raced to the church as soon as he heard about the explosion.

A couple of blocks away, he was stopped at police barricades erected while firemen and black men in their church suits searched for bodies in the rubble. ”There,” Vann recalled, ”standing on the corner was Robert Chambliss, looking down toward the 16th Street church, like a firebug watching his fire.”

When the Rev. Elizabeth H. Cobbs entered the courtroom as a surprise witness in Chambliss’s murder trial in Birmingham on Nov. 15, 1977, Chambliss’s lawyers turned to him and asked who she was. The old man shrugged as if to say he did not know. But I think he realized this short woman who wore a large crucifix on a chain around her neck was about to put him in prison. ”Libby” Cobbs was the niece of Chambliss’ wife, Flora, who would die in 1982. During the racial turmoil in Birmingham, Libby Cobbs, then in her early 20’s, had been a frequent visitor in the Chambliss home. Years later, she was ordained as a Methodist minister. Now, after much soul-searching, she was ready to testify about her conversations with her uncle on the Saturday before the church exploded.

”He said he had been fighting a one-man war since World War II,” Mrs. Cobbs told the court, ”and he said if anyone had backed him up, they would have had the g.d. niggers in their place by now.” According to Mrs. Cobbs, on Sept. 14, the day before the bombing, Chambliss was angry about a local newspaper that carried a story saying a white girl had been attacked the previous day by a black man with a knife.

”He placed his hands on the newspaper,” she said, glancing down from the witness stand toward her uncle. The old man, seated between his lawyers, doodled absently on a legal pad. ”He looked me in the face and said, ‘Just wait till after Sunday morning, and they will beg us to let them segregate.’ I asked him what he meant and he said, ‘Just wait and see.’ ”

Mrs. Cobbs was the only female relative of Chambliss to testify, but she was not the only one involved in sending him to prison. During the trial, Mrs. Chambliss was in touch by telephone with Bob Eddy, the state’s chief investigator for the prosecution. For years, according to Eddy, Mrs. Chambliss had been secretly providing information to local and Federal law enforcement officials about the activities of her husband and his Klan associates. Eddy and other investigators agree that Chambliss would never have been convicted without the information from Chambliss’s wife. But Mrs. Chambliss was only part of the small network of women with Klan ties who passed information to the authorities.

A pivotal role was played by another woman, who asked investigators to shield her identity permanently and who is referred to here by her Justice Department pseudonym, Dale Tarrant. Over the years, she was the conduit by which information from Mrs. Chambliss and other Klan sources was given to to James Hancock, a detective for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department. Some investigators also believe that after the bombing, Mrs. Chambliss helped Dale Tarrant and Hancock install an eavesdropping device in the Chambliss kitchen.

Immediately after the bombing, Dale Tarrant told Hancock, who told the F.B.I. that Chambliss and Troy Ingram, an automobile mechanic who has since died, built the bomb at Ingram’s house. In 1977, although Dale Tarrant refused to testify for fear of revealing her identity, her information was central to building the case against Chambliss. Why did it take so long – from the church bombing in 1963 until Chambliss’s trial in 1977 – for this information to result in a prosecution and conviction? For an answer, it is necessary to consider the bungled investigations of the 1960’s.

”No avenue of investigative activity has been overlooked … As a result, it is apparent that the bombing was the handiwork of former Klansmen Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, Thomas E. Blanton Jr. and probably Troy Ingram … ”

This F.B.I. memorandum from the Birmingham field office to Hoover on May 13, 1965, also told the F.B.I. Director that his agents had found three eyewitnesses who said they had seen Chambliss and others near the 16th Street church at 2:15 A.M., about eight hours before the explosion. Based on what it called this ”significant breakthrough,” the field office asked Hoover for permission to offer its evidence to Federal and state prosecutors. Even with Alabama’s all-white jury system, the agent in charge of the Birmingham field office assured Hoover, there was a ”climate of public opinion favoring prosecution.”

Six days later, Hoover, in a memo declaring that the chances for conviction were ”remote,” ordered the agents in Birmingham not to meet with state or Federal prosecutors. A Justice Department task force assigned in 1978 to investigate the F.B.I.’s handling of Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., a paid informant in the Eastview Klavern, concluded that Hoover also prevented the Justice Department from being informed about the breakthrough even though President Kennedy and later President Johnson had pressed for arrests in the bombing case.

Although the 312-page report of the Rowe Task Force has not been voluntarily released, I secured a copy several years ago and published its findings about Hoover’s handling of the Birmingham case. The report was inconclusive on the troubling question of whether Rowe, while on the F.B.I.’s payroll, was involved in the bombing.

Hoover’s decision not to allow prosecutors access to that information stalled the F.B.I. investigation for good. Twelve years would pass before Chambliss’s indictment, and the push for that indictment, would come from Alabama authorities who had to overcome F.B.I. resistance to secure it. Under Hoover, the bureau not only shelved its investigation, but it offered a cruelly inaccurate excuse to the children’s parents. They said they were told the Government knew who committed the crime, but lacked witnesses who would testify in court. Hoover, however, had been assured that two of the three eyewitnesses, including Dale Tarrant, were probably willing to testify. He was also informed that another witness was willing to testify that he had heard Tommy Blanton affirm that he and Bobby Cherry were involved in the bombing.

Hoover, who refused to act on this information on May 19, 1965, was not the first official to impede the 16th Street investigation. Col. Albert J. Lingo, a George Wallace appointee who directed the Alabama Department of Public Safety, had derailed the state investigation in September 1963. Lingo, who got his job after piloting Wallace’s plane in Wallace’s first successful gubernatorial campaign in 1962, had initially been obsessed with pinning the 16th Street bombing on the Black Muslims, according to investigators who worked for him. Although Lingo, who died in 1969, was widely regarded as a Klan sympathizer, officials who worked with him insist that incompetence, rather than a desire to protect Chambliss, led him to his disastrous intervention in the case.

Ignoring Lingo’s Muslim theory, James Hancock, who operated independently as a sheriff’s detective, was concentrating on Chambliss and his crony, Troy Ingram, and other members of the Cahaba River group. With F.B.I. bugging equipment, Hancock eavesdropped on Chambliss and others in Chambliss’s kitchen. ”Some of the conversations they had would curl your hair,” recalled Hancock, a big, tough-talking cop born in Mount Olive, Ala., a Klan hotbed. ”Tommy (Blanton) said, ‘I’ll go to Fort McClellan and get a .45 machine gun and step inside the door of the church and show you how to kill some niggers.’ ” Chambliss, Hancock says, had a constant refrain: ”We’re going to have to kill a bunch of them sons of bitches before we bring them to their knees.”

In the weeks after the bombing, Hancock began quietly calling in Ingram and the others for interrogation. State investigators such as Ben L. Allen, dissuading Lingo from his Muslim theory, also zeroed in on the Cahaba River clique. Troy Ingram failed a lie-detector test, and Allen believed he was about to break. Hancock said he also was able to play on the conspirators’ fears that someone in the group would confess in return for a lighter sentence. ”I had Blanton up there in jail. I had him far enough along that he was hanging on to my arm crying, saying, ‘Don’t let them do it to me.’ ”

Hancock said he told his boss, Sheriff Mel Bailey, that he could break the case in two or three more weeks. The state investigators were giving similar information to Lingo. Suddenly, ignoring Bailey’s protest and the advice of his own detectives that he was moving prematurely, Lingo took over the case, ordering the arrest of Chambliss and another Klansman on Sept. 29.

Wallace’s spokesmen trumpeted the news that Alabama authorities had succeeded where the F.B.I. had failed. It looked like an important public-relations triumph for Wallace, who was trying to fight off criticism that he incited and condoned racial violence. But after Chambliss had been questioned for two days, Wallace’s triumph turned into humiliation when Lingo could only file misdemeanor charges of possession of dynamite against Chambliss and even that minor charge fell apart in court.

Chambliss and the other key suspects consulted lawyers, who immediately stopped the polygraph tests and told the men not to talk. That decision, according to Hancock, brought his own investigation to a halt. Bitter at Lingo for having frightened the Klansmen into hiring a lawyer, Hancock resigned and says he subsequently destroyed his files on the case. A year would pass before the angry Hancock would take the action that would lay the groundwork for Chambliss’s eventual conviction, introducing F.B.I. agents to his key informant, Dale Tarrant, who was crucial in bringing Chambliss to trial.

But some investigators assert Hancock might have prevented the deaths had he acted promptly when Dale Tarrant told him at a meeting at 9 A.M. on Sept. 15 that dynamite had been planted at a church in Birmingham. Hancock says the state investigators had leaked speculation to reporters that he lingered too long with Dale Tarrant because they were romantically involved. Asked what they did that morning, he responds, ”None of your damn business.”

Like many detectives involved in the original investigation, Hancock is today tormented by the belief that, without Lingo, he could have nailed all the alleged conspirators 20 years ago. He had promised as much in a confrontation with Matt Murphy, a well-known Klan lawyer, when Murphy told him that he could no longer interrogate Klan members. ”I told him, ‘Matt, I’m going to get them,’ and I was wrong, so wrong. I just hated everything they stood for, from the ground up. We don’t need people like that on the earth, using up oxygen our grand-children will need.”

”Of course, the timing of it was very damaging to me politically,” says Bill Baxley, who reopened the bombing case in 1971 as Alabama’s Attorney General, ”because if we had been able to wrap it up in ’73 or ’74, like we should have, instead of trying it a year before I ran for Governor, I think I might have won. … Every day, every town, every plant gate, a dozen people a day, at least, would not shake hands or would say, ‘I would have voted for you, I liked you, I thought you were my kind, but you put that old man in jail.’ ”

Baxley was a law student at the University of Alabama the day the children died. Like many white Alabamians his age, he was both repelled by what was going on in the state and powerless to stop it. In 1970, when he took office as Attorney General, he wrote the names of Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins on his telephone credit card to remind himself, every time he made a call, that now he did have the power to revive an investigation that lay dormant at the local, state and Federal levels. Baxley assigned the case to Bob Eddy, a bespectacled, straitlaced detective from Bull Connor’s hometown of Plantersville. He also appointed George Beck and John Yung assistant attorneys general to supervise Eddy. None of them had a record of crusading for civil rights, but all, as white Alabamians, had felt the humiliation of coming of age at a time when the nation assumed that George Wallace and Bull Connor were the best white Alabama could produce.

Their investigation moved slowly. By 1975, with the F.B.I. still refusing to share its files, Baxley says he threatened William Saxbe, President Ford’s Attorney General, saying the parents of the dead children would hold a press conference in Washington to accuse the F.B.I. of shielding the killers. Saxbe agreed to limited cooperation, allowing Eddy to question F.B.I. agents as they sat across the desk from him reading files. The F.B.I. officials adopted this ”game,” as the Baxley team called it, because they did not want the Alabamians to see their interviews with confidential informants.

Noticing that the agents were reluctant to answer questions about Chambliss’s niece, Elizabeth Cobbs, Eddy located her. When they met, she assumed that he knew as much about her as the F.B.I. did, and she acknowledged that she was the informant known as Abington Spaulding. Through her, Eddy soon met Dale Tarrant. Finding them was a breakthrough for the Baxley team. But it also led them into a frustrating shadow world of Klan intrigue in which they gradually discovered that they were dealing through intermediaries with the F.B.I.’s true source and the state of Alabama’s most important informant, Mrs. Chambliss.

Eddy learned that Dale Tarrant and Elizabeth Cobbs had told the F.B.I. in 1965 that they had disguised themselves with wigs, followed Chambliss and the others to the 16th Street church and watched the men plant the bomb. But Eddy and his colleagues were shaken when Mrs. Cobbs and Dale Tarrant, confronted with the account they had given the F.B.I., denied they were at the church. Subsequent polygraph tests administered on Aug. 31, 1977, supported their recantations.

The lie-detector tests, though, indicated that Mrs. Cobbs was being truthful about hearing incriminating remarks made by Chambliss. Moreover, the polygraph operator reported that Dale Tarrant had told him, based ”upon information received from Mrs. Chambliss, she was convinced that Chambliss had been involved in the bombing.”

The Baxley investigators concluded that Mrs. Cobbs and Dale Tarrant invented the wig story so they could serve as stand-ins, giving the F.B.I. information that Mrs. Chambliss was too intimidated to tell in person.

”They hated him. And so did the wife,” says a prosecutor who dealt with the women, ”but she was afraid to leave him.” The prosecutor would later say that these feelings had been created by Chambliss’s relentless intimidation, abuse and neglect of his family. In interviews with state investigators, Dale Tarrant confirmed her role as an intermediary for Mrs. Chambliss. ”You know where this came from. This came from Tee,” Dale Tarrant said, using Mrs. Chambliss’s nickname.

Mrs. Cobbs and Dale Tarrant’s amended stories now threw into question the identifications of Herman Cash and Bobby Cherry, and raised doubts, in particular, about reports that Cash was at the scene. However, Bob Eddy remains convinced that Mrs. Chambliss and possibly Dale Tarrant observed events at the church. Both Eddy and the Justice Department report suggest that fear of being called to testify could have skewed Dale Tarrant’s polygraph. So, the heart of the account relayed from Mrs. Chambliss by Mrs. Cobbs and Dale Tarrant and recorded in F.B.I. documents became the basic investigative scenario for the Baxley group, who verified the women’s accounts – at least as far as Chambliss was involved – through an independent eyewitness.

Kirthus Glenn, who had been visiting Birmingham from Detroit on Sept. 15, 1963, identified a car belonging to Tommy Blanton as the vehicle she saw parked near the church the morning of the bombing. She identified Chambliss as one of three whitemen sitting in the car in the predawn darkness of that Sunday. Armed with these facts, Baxley and his team felt they could prosecute Chambliss and possibly Blanton.

Baxley was running out of time, however. For 1977 was half over, and 1978 would mark the end of Baxley’s second term as Attorney General. That year was also when he planned to run for Governor, to succeed Wallace. Baxley and Eddy tracked down Bobby Cherry in Texas and failed, narrowly they believed, to talk him into testifying against the other suspects in exchange for a reduced charge. Cherry, according to Eddy, had turned ”white as a sheet” when they confronted him with F.B.I. file information, including a quote attributed to Chambliss about how funny Cherry had looked scurrying down the alley behind the church with the bomb. But after two long, tense interrogations, Cherry denied any part in the bombing and said he would not cooperate. They never made any progress toward making a deal with Cash, who when contacted about this article again denied any part in the crime and denied knowing Chambliss. Baxley says he never approached Chambliss or Blanton, because he regarded them as the main targets for prosecution.

By late 1977, Baxley decided he could spend no more time bargaining for a confession. Instead, he decided to try Chambliss, hoping that if he won a conviction, Blanton would be frightened into confessing.

Chambliss, who was offically convicted of only one of the four deaths, was sentenced to life imprisonment. But prospects for a second trial involving Blanton were damaged when Kirthus Glenn testified she could not identify the driver of Blanton’s car.

”I just really took a sinking feeling when she said that,” recalled Eddy, ”because all the other times she identified Blanton. She identified Blanton right on up until trial date, and I think it was just being there in front of all those people, and not thinking, she answered the question that way. What are you doing to do – go back and say, ‘You’re mistaken, aren’t you?’ ”

In fact, F.B.I. documents indicate that Mrs. Glenn had wavered earlier about Blanton’s identity, although she was always certain in her identification of his car. Yet, Baxley and his former colleagues believe a case could be made today against Blanton despite Mrs. Glenn’s damaging remark. For one thing, Eddy said, additional evidence might be available from Blanton’s former women friends, some of whom had given information to the F.B.I. about him back in the 1960’s.

The surviving parents of the four girls – Chris and Maxine McNair, Alpha Robertson, Claude and Gertrude Wesley, Alice Collins – have gone their own ways since 1963. Only Mr. Wesley remains active in the 16th Street church. Mrs. Collins has joined the Faith Cathedral Church of God. Deeply religious, she believes that the final reckoning for 16th Street must be left to the judgment of God. At least once a year, Mrs. Robertson travels to Chicago for a board meeting of the Carole Robertson Center for Learning, a day-care facility named for her daughter. Her late husband, a school principal, never recovered from Carole’s death.

As the youngest of the parents, the McNairs made a conscious decision to start over. The elder of their two children born since the bombing will start college at the University of Alabama this fall. McNair, who felt that dwelling on vengeance ”would have made me like a mad dog,” plunged into politics and community service. He served in the State Legislature and made a creditable run for Congress in a white-majority district. McNair also founded a magazine, Down Home, and after years of public silence about his feelings on the bombing, he recently ran a cover story titled, ”Did They Die in Vain?” The article points out that no memorial to the girls exists in the city of Birmingham except for a stained-glass window at the 16th Street church, paid for by the people of Wales. (There is also a plaque on the church that, ironically, misspells Carole Robertson’s name.)

In asking that question, McNair found in himself a surprisingly deep well of frustration. As the anniversary approached, McNair said, he often thought of the efforts of Jews to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust. In contrast, he observes ”People want you to forget that 16th Street happened. Why do you want to sweep it under the rug? Damn it, it happened, and only one person has been convicted of it. And, damn it, there was more than any one person from all the records that I’ve seen.”

Even so, a deep impulse toward forgetfulness is apparent in Birmingham now, especially among the men once associated with Eastview 13. Many of them are reluctant to admit knowing Chambliss. Tommy Blanton has filed suit against the Government to have his name stricken from the investigative records. When I talked to Blanton, who at 44 is a paunchy, lonely looking man who now manages apartments left him when his father died, he was more eager to talk about astrology than the Klan. Then I mentioned I had received letters from Chambliss. Suddenly, Blanton wanted to know if the old man had talked about him and if he seemed to be in his right mind.

Blanton need not have worried. Chambliss has turned down many chances to get a shorter sentence by testifying against his associates. He apparently intends to go to the grave protecting them. In my trips to see him, I have become convinced that only two things matter to him now, the oath of Klan secrecy he swore 59 years ago and the memory of his dead wife. Chambliss has never been told that his wife, so repelled by violence and so abused, put him in prison. I chose not to tell, leaving him instead with a lie he could die with. ”I always treated my wife right,” Chambliss said. ”She never wanted for a thing.”