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Trial To Commence In Long-Deferred Church Bombing Case
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama, April 16 (News Agencies) - Jury selection was to begin Monday in the trial a former Ku Klux Klan member charged with first-degree murder in the 1963 church-bombing deaths here of four little girls, which proved to be a watershed event in the U.S. civil rights struggle.
Thomas Blanton goes on trial 38 years after a dynamite blast rocked the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing the four youngsters and injuring about 20 other churchgoers.
Shortly after the church bombing, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) drew up a list of four white men suspected of involvement in the bombing, including Blanton, but ultimately shelved the case, with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover saying at the time saying that their evidence was weak.
In 1980 however, a Justice Department report concluded that Hoover had withheld significant evidence in the case.
After the success of the 1997 Spike Lee documentary film "Four Little Girls," the FBI announced another investigation, and last May, Blanton, now 62, gave himself up after being named in an Alabama Grand Jury indictment.
A Blanton co-defendant, Bobby Frank Cherry, 71, recently was deemed mentally incompetent to stand trial but will undergo a future psychiatric evaluation.
Another of the original suspects, Robert Chambliss, was convicted of murder in connection with the bombing in 1977, and died in prison. A fourth suspect died without being charged.
A guilty verdict in the long-deferred trial could represent significant progress towards exorcising the demons of the Civil Rights era, when authorities throughout the southern United States allowed the Ku Klux Klan to operate with impunity.
It may also help the town redeem its name. After the bombing Birmingham acquired the nickname "Dynamite City" or "Bombingham."
In Birmingham, Carolyn McKinstry, vice president of the 16th Street Baptist Church board of trustees, said last week that the trial about to open was "a step in the right direction.
"It's a kind of olive branch, but it's being extended very late."
One person who remembers that Sunday morning is Birmingham-born U.S. national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, eight years old at the time. One of the dead children, 11-year-old Denise McNair, was her friend, Rice said in a 1999 speech.
Civil rights leader Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, commented: "This trial should have been over and done with 30 to 40 years ago. But I hope the family of the girls slain get some relief."
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