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Former Klan Member Guilty
BIRMINGHAM, Alabama, May
2 (News Agencies) - The U.S. civil rights movement scored another victory Tuesday as a former member of the Ku Klux Klan was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison in a 1963 bombing of a local black church, which left four girls dead.
A jury of four blacks and eight whites handed down its verdict after only two and a half hours of deliberation.
Former Ku Klux Klansman Thomas Blanton, 62, was found guilty of bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church 38 years ago and killing 14-year-old Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins, as well as Denise McNair, age 11 at the time.
More than 20 fellow churchgoers were also injured, their faces cut by shards from the stained-glass windows.
Defense attorney John Robbins said his client, who was taken to county jail immediately after the end of the trial, would file an appeal.
Robbins said he knew he had lost the case when the jury came back with a verdict so quickly.
"I told him to be braced for it," he told reporters after the trial. "A quick verdict was not a good verdict."
The bombing, which went down in history as a watershed even in the struggle for civil rights in segregated Alabama, came after years of attacks on the homes of black leaders around the city.
But the path to discovering the truth was as difficult as the civil rights struggle itself.
Following the blast in 1963, the Federal Bureau of Investigation drew up a list of four white suspects. But then-FBI Director Edgar Hoover ruled that chances of getting a conviction were remote.
The case was shelved in 1968, but reopened three years later.
One of the four 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.
In 1980, a Justice Department report concluded that Hoover had withheld significant evidence.
But there was no real movement towards further convictions until the 1997 documentary film directed by Spike Lee, "4 Little Girls," re-ignited public interest in the case.
The FBI announced yet another investigation, and last May Blanton gave himself up after being named in an Alabama Grand Jury indictment.
The defining moment in the trial came after the prosecution introduced tapes made by the FBI from a listening device planted under the kitchen sink in Blanton's apartment in 1964.
The tapes proved that Blanton admitted making a bomb used in the attack on the church in a conversation with an FBI informant, according to the prosecution.
"These children must not die in vain," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Posey in his closing arguments during the trial. "Don't let the deafening sound of the bomb blast drown out the voices of these children."
The conviction mark another step in the long fight by the civil rights movement to bring justice and closure to victim of racial violence that raged across southern states in the 1960s.
Byron De La Beckwith was convicted in 1994 for the 1963 murder of Medgar Evers, a leader of the Mississippi branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
In 1998, Klan leader Sam Bowers, was convicted of the murder of Vernon Dahmer, also an NAACP leader, in Mississippi who died when his family home was firebombed.
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