Long a suspect in the case, Blanton was the second of three people convicted in the bombing. I’m not saying what I will say until then,” said Rudolph. The crowd will include Rudolph, who survived injuries including the loss of an eye and testified against Blanton at his trial. Jones plans to attend the hearing in opposition to Blanton’s early release, and so do several relatives of the girls and the current pastor of 16th Street Baptist, the reverend Arthur Price. “This was, as I said during the trial, an act of terrorism before the word ‘terrorism’ was part of our everyday lives,” Jones said. Their deaths inside a church on a Sunday morning became a symbol worldwide of the depth of racial hatred in the South.ĭoug Jones, a former US attorney who prosecuted Blanton on the state charge, said Blanton shouldn’t be released since he has never accepted responsibility for the bombing or expressed any remorse for a crime that was aimed at maintaining racial separation at a time Birmingham’s public schools were facing a court order to desegregate. The girls, who were inside the church preparing for worship, died instantly in a hail of bricks and stone that seriously injured Collins’ sister, Sarah Collins Rudolph. The blast killed 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris, also known as Cynthia Wesley. “It would be a slap in the face to those young ladies and their families to release him,” Simelton said.īlanton was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2001 for being part of a group of Klansmen who planted a dynamite bomb that exploded outside 16th Street Baptist on September 15, 1963. NAACP chapters statewide are sending letters in opposition to Blanton’s release, and the Birmingham chapter is sending a busload of people to oppose parole, he said. The president of the Alabama NAACP, Bernard Simelton, said releasing Blanton at a time when protests are occurring nationwide over police killings of black people would send a horrible message. Inmates are not allowed to attend parole hearings in Alabama, but opponents of Blanton’s release are expected to address the three-person board when it meets in Montgomery. The board has scheduled a hearing for Wednesday to consider parole for the 78-year-old Blanton. Soon, Alabama’s parole board will decide whether Blanton deserves to be free after serving 15 years of a life term for murder. Today, Blanton is old and imprisoned, the last survivor among three one-time KKK members convicted of murder in the bombing. Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr was a young Ku Klux Klansman with a reputation for hatred towards the black community in 1963, when a bomb ripped a hole in the side of 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls during the civil rights movement.
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