Last Chance for Justice

September 15, 1963, a bomb goes off. Four young girls are killed. Twenty two people are injured. The place – the 16th Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham, Alabama. The explosion that rocked the African-American church propelled the Civil Rights Movement in our country and helped lead to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The 16th Street Baptist Church incident was not new to the activism to advance civil rights. The church was a place where civil rights meetings were held regularly. Civil rights leaders including the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph David Abernathy Sr. often provided inspiration.

It was a time when segregation, particularly in the South, was being challenged. In May of 1963, the City of Birmingham – a Ku Klux Klan bastion at the time – agreed to integrate public places. This angered a community which fought hard to keep it segregated. Bombings were not new to Birmingham. Neither were other violent acts against the African-American community, such as hoses and dogs turned on children and protestors and clashes between civil rights crusaders and the violent Ku Klux Klan.

The three-story church became a target. Tension escalated further when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began to campaign to register the African-American community to vote in the city.  At about 10:20 on the morning of September 15, 26 children gathered in the church’s basement when the bomb exploded. President John F. Kennedy ordered the FBI to bring justice and find the bombers. After a decade, only one person was prosecuted, and found guilty of possession of 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. It would take 37 years to uncover a cold murder case resulting in the conviction of the Birmingham murderers.

On February 11 at 7:00 p.m., T.K. Thorne, author of the book “Last Chance for Justice, How Relentless Investigators Uncovered New Evidence Convicting the Birmingham Church Bombers” will be at the Olney Baptist Church in Providence to explain how the people responsible for the bombings were tracked down and convicted.

The program is sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Rhode Island State Council of Churches and the American Baptist Churches of Rhode Island in honor of Black History Month.

FOR MORE INFORMATION contact Marty Cooper, community relations director of the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island at 401-421-4111, ext. 171 or mcooper@jewishallianceri.org.