The Sins of the Father
In the backcountry of East Texas, Tom Cherry sits and wonders about the man next door. Did he commit the infamous bombing of a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, back in 1963, killing four little girls? All Tom knows for sure is that the man is his dad
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Local law enforcement, which had only halfheartedly investigated Klan violence in the past, suspected that the Cahaba Boys were behind the church bombing, since its members were believed to have dynamited dozens of black-owned homes and businesses around town. But it was not until the FBI sent more than fifty agents to Birmingham, making it the bureau's top priority, that Bobby Frank Cherry and his friends were tailed around the clock. "Every time we'd crank up our cars, we'd see a car start up down the street after us," recalled former Klansman Wyman Lee, one of the Cahaba Boys at the time of the bombing. "Everywhere we went, the FBI was already there waiting for us, wanting to talk." The bureau made no secret of its interest in Cherry and hounded him relentlessly. Agents stood outside the Cherry home at all hours of the night, watching in silence, and even Tom's behavior became cause for suspicion: When Tom injured his thumb while playing with matches, he had to answer not only the questions of the emergency room doctor but also those of federal investigators, who wanted to know if he had been fooling with dynamite.
His father said little during his twenty interviews with the FBI that helped his case; instead, he boasted about his hatred for blacks and his predilection for violence. "The only reason I didn't do the church bombing," Cherry bragged to investigators in the fall of 1964, "was maybe because someone beat me to it." He failed a polygraph test that the FBI administered three weeks after the bombing, showing "definite patterns of deception" when he denied planning and executing bombings around Birmingham. More significantly, he showed "a strong reaction" when he was asked if he had known that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church would be bombed, and if he had helped construct a bomb two days beforehand. Rather than condemn the bombing outright, he defended himself by saying he would have chosen different victims; Cherry told agents, according to one FBI file, "that if he had something against that particular church, he would have 'done something to the pastor,' and not kill innocent children." His arrogance could be breathtaking; when agents asked what testimony he might give a grand jury, Cherry replied, "That's when the Fifth Amendment will come in handy."
During one chilling exchange, Cherry offered investigators an account of how the bombing might have indeed been executed. "Cherry stated that if he had wanted to bomb this church, he would probably use two cars and only two men," reads one FBI report from early 1965. "One man would be the lookout and park somewhere in the immediate vicinity, while the other man would drive into the area, park his car, and plant the bomb." Cherry told investigators during another interview precisely how the bomb could have been built, describing in exhaustive detail how to rig a timing device to dynamite. "Cherry cautioned that when dropping the capsule into the acid," the FBI report concludes, "care should be taken to clean off the outside of the capsule, since any of the material contained in the capsule which touches the acid will ignite and can burn the skin." But Cherry continued to insist he had no involvement in the bombing.
The lack of physical evidence recovered at the crime scene, compounded by the Klan's refusal to cooperate with federal investigators, would hamper the FBI's efforts to solve the case. Nevertheless, after nearly two years of relentless inquiry, the FBI believed that it had cracked the case. "No avenue of investigative activity has been overlooked," read a May 13, 1965, memorandum from the Birmingham field office to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. "As a result, it is apparent that the bombing was the handiwork of former Klansmen Robert E. Chambliss, Bobby Frank Cherry, Herman Frank Cash, Thomas E. Blanton, Jr., and probably Troy Ingram." FBI investigators had discovered several eyewitnesses who could place the men outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church at around two-fifteen that Sunday morning and a witness who would testify that Blanton said he and Bobby Frank Cherry had both had a hand in the bombing. But Hoover, reluctant to try a race-charged case before a Southern white jury with only circumstantial evidence, forbade the agents to meet with federal and state prosecutors. The case, for the time being, was shelved and nearly forgotten.
FOR TOM, LIFE WOULD FOREVER BE MEASURED against that moment in 1963 when he stood at his father's side, listening to the sound of dynamite reverberating against the limestone walls of downtown Birmingham. He remembers only fleeting images from that Sunday morning, when the city shuddered beneath his feet: a crowd forming down the street, the wail of ambulances, a white man yelling amid the chaos, "Let's get out of here — the niggers are on the war path." The rest has been muddled by the passage of time; Tom can not discern, in his faded memories, the expression that his father wore after the explosion or what words the men at the Modern Sign Company spoke in its wake. But that moment, however dimly remembered, marked the point when his relationship with his father changed for the worse and defined the years to come, when Bobby Frank Cherry always seemed to be looking over his shoulder. "I remember Daddy saying that they were following him to work, questioning him on the job, taking pictures of him," Tom said.
After the bombing, his father often was absent for days at a time, and his parents' arguments escalated into terrible violence, one fight so brutal he had feared for his mother's life. Virginia Cherry was diagnosed with cancer in the years that followed, Tom remembered, and died in 1968, when he was fifteen. Bobby Frank Cherry soon abandoned his children, placing them first in the care of an orphanage and later with relatives. "I know that makes my dad sound like a sorry SOB, but he couldn't hold down a job and raise seven kids," Tom said. "He did the best he could." Rather than staying at the Gateway Mercy Home with his brothers and sisters, Tom struck out on his own, pumping gas at a Sinclair station for 50 cents an hour and living by his wits. He had always feared that federal agents would take away his father, but instead his father had forsaken him: Tom would spend much of the rest of his life trying to find the father he had lost at fifteen, ready to welcome Bobby Frank Cherry back into his life at any cost.
Tom drifted between Alabama and Texas for several years, and by the time he was in his early twenties, he had made his way to Pascagoula, Mississippi, where he worked in a shipyard and fell in briefly with the local Klan. "It's hard to sit here now and explain the exact reason why I joined," Tom said. "I'd had a lot of racist stuff shoved down my throat growing up, and my mind-set was different then. The Klan was like a family tradition, I guess. It turned out to be a bunch of lowlifes who wanted to go do some stupid stuff. We burnt some crosses on top of a hill, out between Pascagoula and Biloxi, that you could see for miles and miles out on that flat stone land. But bringing harm to people, that ain't no good. I told them I would have no part in that, and I bailed out after a couple of months." Tom saw his father from time to time, fishing with him on his occasional visits to Pascagoula. When he decided to leave Mississippi behind, Tom — as all but one of his siblings would do later — headed for Texas, the state where Bobby Frank Cherry now resided, in hopes of re-establishing a relationship with his father. Whatever grudge he held against his father for abandoning him he soon forgave, hoping that the two might once again be together as father and son.
Texas was where Bobby Frank Cherry had come to escape the burdens of the past. In 1971 Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley had reopened the church-bombing investigation; Cherry left Birmingham soon afterward, working as a welder and later opening a carpet-cleaning business in Grand Prairie, outside Dallas. But he could not dodge the law forever: On a hot August day in 1977 Cherry received a call from Bob Eddy, then the attorney general's lead investigator of the case. A former sheriff from Huntsville, Alabama, Eddy was a masterful interviewer who had cracked some of Alabama's toughest cases, having shrugged off late-night death threats and faced down more than one Klansman wielding a shotgun. His assignment to solve the church bombing was not an easy one; the FBI initially refused to share most of the evidence it had gathered from confidential sources during its original investigation, leaving him with little more than a cold trail. But after interviewing Klan informants and following old leads, he had found compelling evidence against Robert Chambliss — the first of the Cahaba Boys the Alabama attorney general's office planned to prosecute for the church bombing — though Eddy was also certain of Cherry's complicity.
Eddy came to Grand Prairie to persuade Cherry to talk; the case against Chambliss was good, but not airtight, and Eddy hoped that Cherry's testimony could make the difference. The former Klansman seemed ill at ease when the two men met early one August afternoon in 1977 at the Grand Prairie police station, interrupting the conversation with sardonic laughter and reminding Eddy that he couldn't stay long. They talked until ten o'clock that evening, however, and Eddy remains convinced that he narrowly missed persuading Cherry to come clean. "I told him, 'Chambliss said he saw you walking down the alley [by the church] with the bomb,'" Eddy recalled, referring to information he had gotten from another investigator, "and Cherry turned white as a sheet." Cherry left the police station that night tired and shaken, promising that he would sleep on Eddy's request to testify for the state. But Cherry placed several calls that night to friends in Birmingham, who said that Chambliss had never spoken to Eddy. Angry that he had been tricked, Cherry phoned Eddy at his hotel and told the investigator he was through talking.
Chambliss was successfully prosecuted later that year and sentenced to life in prison, putting the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing back on the front pages of newspapers around the country. (He died in prison in 1985.) Attorney General Baxley vowed to pursue the four other Klansmen the FBI had originally suspected in the bombing but was forbidden by state law to seek a third term; his successor, Charles Graddick, did not pursue the case. "I'm one hundred percent sure of Cherry's involvement: There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it," said Baxley, who is now in private practice. "He's mean and vicious and unrepentant, and it was devastating to realize that we were never going to get a chance to bring him to justice." Eddy felt similarly defeated. He had returned with Baxley to Grand Prairie after Chambliss was indicted, warning Cherry that he could face a longer prison sentence for not cooperating with the investigation and making a final plea for his help. But Cherry had been unimpressed. "Go ahead and put me in jail — I don't give a damn," he spat at Eddy. "You ain't got a thing on me."
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