‘Bombingham’

A dynamite bomb detonated in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and kills four young black girls, 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. President Kennedy says, “I know I speak on behalf of all Americans in expressing a deep sense of outrage and grief.” No white city officials attend the girls’ funerals in the city known pejoratively as “Bombingham” because of the 20 unsolved bombings against civil rights leaders’ homes or sanctuaries in the preceding seven years.¹⁰ Though the FBI identifies four Ku Klux Klansmen within days as the perpetrators, no one is prosecuted for 14 years. Eventually, between 1977 and 2002, three men — Robert Chambliss, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry — are convicted; the fourth suspect, Herman Cash, was deceased.