Word: blantons
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...Cherrys, it appears, pulled up dirt with their roots. Last week it was old mud when Bobby Frank Cherry, 69, and Thomas E. Blanton Jr., 61, both former Ku Klux Klansmen, were indicted by an Alabama grand jury on murder charges stemming from the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham that killed four black girls at Sunday school. Both men maintain their innocence. The attack was one of the most horrific crimes of the civil rights era, but only one suspect in the case, Robert E. Chambliss--who was convicted of murder in 1977 and died in jail...
...bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church has been under investigation by law-enforcement officials, off and on, for almost four decades. Within days of the bombing, four men--Cherry, Blanton, Chambliss and Herman Frank Cash--were considered prime suspects. But according to some officials, witness statements were hard to come by. First there was the fear: If a person were to testify, would there be reprisals? Then there was hopelessness: Would a court in segregationist Alabama really do justice? And then there were the cops. During the '60s, the Klan had ears and eyes and tongues within the local...
Doug Jones, the U.S. Attorney who will prosecute Cherry and Blanton, hasn't disclosed what new evidence has been uncovered, but experts believe ex-Klansmen and associates of Blanton's and Cherry's may be ready to testify. Cherry's relatives--including an ex-wife and a granddaughter who have said they heard him boast about the bombing--have reportedly come forward. Willajean Brogdon, one of Cherry's five wives, told the Jackson, Miss., Clarion-Ledger, "Bob told me he didn't put the bomb together. He said...
...Blanton was a 25-year-old 10th-grade dropout working in a stockroom. Bobby Frank Cherry was 33 years old with only eight years of school; he was missing all his upper teeth and had already fathered seven children. Both men had been in the Klan but found it too restrained for their liking. So, along with a few others, they formed the Cahaba Boys, who met beneath the Cahaba River bridge on U.S. 280 to drink beer and talk about saving the South from Jews, Catholics and blacks...
...boys, remanded to home detention by a judge, are free to return to school. Englewood residents are now claiming police coercion and racial bias in the case. The police deny any misconduct. "These babies just did not do this," says Shirley Blanton, a close friend of the families. Now, to celebrate, she says, "the whole neighborhood is going to have a barbecue"--except, perhaps, for the kin of Ryan Harris...