James Rotch, a local white attorney, is unsure what to make of the trial. For while Blanton’s unpunished crime was “an open sore” festering in the heart of Birmingham, Blanton’s conviction was not necessarily the cure. “People talk about closure. If that had been my children in that church, there wouldn’t be any closure,” confided Rotch.
It is not only that Blanton killed children, or that so many years have passed; it is that Blanton’s guilt extends far beyond himself and his fellow KKK bombers. (Of those, Robert Edward Chambliss was convicted in 1977, Herman Frank Cash died before he could stand trial and Frank Cherry, who was to be tried with Blanton, was declared mentally incompetent.) Although only four men, flying the Confederate flag, went on the mission, the entire power structure of the city was complicit. For the Birmingham of that era was a place where bombings of prominent blacks were routine, where the city fathers fanned the flames of racial hatred, where Bull Connor, commissioner of public safety, actively conspired to have civil-rights leader Fred Shuttlesworth assassinated. (Fortunately, Shuttlesworth survived.) Instead of stopping the madness, the Feds became part of it. As Bill Baxley, Alabama’s former attorney general, noted in a New York Times op-ed last week, the surveillance tapes that helped to convict Blanton had been in the FBI’s possession for decades. Had the FBI produced those tapes in 1977 when Baxley prosecuted Chambliss, he believes he could have convicted all four Klansmen.
In “Carry Me Home” Birmingham native Diane McWhorter reminds us that four girls were not the only ones killed in Birmingham on Sept. 15, 1963. That same day, two Eagle Scouts shot and killed a 13-year-old black boy for sport. And a cop killed a 16-year-old black boy for tossing rocks at a car decorated with anti-black slurs. Hate crimes, as McWhorter observed in a conversation, were not some aberration perpetrated by a “lunatic fringe of rednecks.” The fringe, in this case, was the center, with the Klan serving as hooded enforcers for the elite.
Had Blanton and his crew been prosecuted and convicted back then, the legal actions would have had real consequence; they would have stopped racial terrorism in its tracks and served notice that decency would prevail over fear. Instead, Alabamians went along, quietly encouraging the violence–and the killing–to continue.
“For the sake of justice, for stability and the restoration of dignity to victims, there must be accountability for the past,” argues Alex Boraine, deputy chair of South Africa’s Truth Commission, in “A Country Unmasked.” The problem with the Blanton case is that the justice is belated (and therefore inadequate) and broader accountability nonexistent. So the result of the conviction is not reconciliation, but relief (that Blanton was not set free) and weary resignation.
That may be all we can expect. It’s not as if anything could make up for the atrocities perpetrated by Blanton and his kind. A powerful argument can be made that progress is best served by forgetting and moving on. There is something undeniably appealing in the spirit of the Mozambicans who surveyed their fractured country and told author Priscilla Hayner (“Unspeakable Truths”), “[We don’t] want to enter this morass of conflict, hatred and pain. We want to focus on the future.” Unfortunately, many Americans remain stuck in the past.
Only last month, whites in Mississippi voted, in a landslide, to keep the Confederate battle emblem on their state flag; and only last year, 40 percent of Alabamians voted to retain a 99-year state constitutional provision prohibiting interracial marriage. “The battle for equality is an everyday struggle,” concluded James Lewis, publisher of The Birmingham Times, a black weekly.
Countless Southerners, in fact, have moved on and are no longer refighting the Civil War. They understand enough of the South’s history to know better than to try to re-create it. Among them are people such as Rotch, whose Birmingham pledge movement invites individuals everywhere to forswear racial discrimination. And it is those people who will recognize that while Blanton’s conviction does not represent justice, it does provide an opportunity–to reflect on the past and to remind ourselves how easily ordinary folks, threatened with change, can end up on the side of evil.
