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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They called themselves the Cahaba Boys, after the slow-moving river south of Birmingham, where every Thursday night they gathered in the woods beneath a low-slung stone bridge. The splinter group of a dozen or so men was founded in the early sixties, according to FBI files, by renegade Klansmen who believed that the mainstream Klan was not radical enough. Membership in this brotherhood was for those proven both loyal and not squeamish. Its ringleader was Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, a man with a long history of brutality toward black people — including a charge of "flogging while masked" — and the prime suspect in dozens of racially motivated bombings around Birmingham. Its ranks included a number of small-time bullies and thugs, as well as prominent Klansmen like Gary Thomas Rowe, who was later indicted but never brought to trial for participating in the high-profile murder of white civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo during the 1965 Selma march. The Cahaba Boys had ties to local politicians, law enforcement, and the most rabid white supremacists of the day: J. B. Stoner, the leader of the neo-Nazi National States Rights Party, was a frequent visitor, as was Imperial Wizard Bobby Shelton, then the most powerful Klansman in the nation.
The Cahaba Boys committed acts of violence with a ferocity that was unmatched even by their fellow Klansmen, according to FBI files. Carrying foot-long chains, battery cables, and baseball bats that had been hollowed out and filled with lead, they spread terror on city buses, where they punished blacks who were sitting too close to whites, and in racially mixed neighborhoods, where they lobbed explosives into the driveways of black families. "Nigger-knocking" was standard practice once the sun went down: Blacks were taken to remote areas, beaten, and sometimes brutally tortured. "The Klan wasn't violent enough for them," said Bob Eddy, who is currently assisting the FBI with its investigation of Bobby Frank Cherry. "They were responsible for firebombings, floggings, dynamiting people's homes. How often Cherry was along on those rides, we don't know, but Chambliss told me years later, before he died, that Cherry was at the bombing of the Gaston Motel." That bomb exploded on May 11, 1963, only a block from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and would have changed the course of history had it not missed its mark: It was intended for Martin Luther King, Jr.
None of this was known to the young Tom Cherry, who was raised to believe that the Klan embodied all that was right and good. As a boy he attended Klan rallies with his father on the outskirts of town and watched in awe as huge crosses wrapped in burlap were doused in kerosene and set afire. "The Klan stood for Christianity and purity," he recalled. "We were told that any other race besides the white race was second class and blacks had no place in society. When you're young, you think it's cool, you think it's right." So obsessed was Birmingham with race that nothing else seemed to matter. "I remember when everyone was worried about Russia doing this and Cuba doing that and us all getting blown up," said Tom, "and everyone in Alabama was worried about being integrated. It's a sad thing, isn't it? After we went to school together, we found out there wasn't much difference in none of us. We were all struggling just as hard to buy groceries as they was, they was all wanting bicycles for Christmas just like we was."
Tom knew nothing of the Klan's night-riding as a child, but on more than one occasion, his father's hatred for blacks turned to violence right before his eyes: He recalls being sent to the back of his parents' house with his brothers and sisters one Halloween, while his father — furious that two black families had dared to knock on his front door as they made their rounds trick-or-treating — began firing his gun indiscriminately from the porch. There were other confrontations over the years; when a black teenager tried to steal a ball of string that Tom used for his newspaper route, Cherry leveled his gun at the nineteen-year-old, who had grabbed a pipe, and then beat him senseless. Tom was frightened by such savagery and wondered sometimes at his father's coldheartedness — "There seemed to be no pity, no sympathy at all" — but he couldn't help but notice that no one else seemed to be bothered by it, least of all the authorities. "The police didn't care," he said. "You could do just about whatever you wanted to a black person and not get in trouble down there."
But Tom, then just a boy, was looking for a father, not a political mentor. He can still remember the thrill of hearing his father's footsteps coming up the front drive; he was never happier, he said, than when he was at his father's side. Cherry sometimes let Tom tag along with him to Jack Cash's Barbecue, a Klan haunt where Tom ate hamburgers at the counter while his father conducted his business at a nearby table. But more often than not, Cherry headed out of the house alone. Sometimes, when Cherry reached for his coat, Tom would dart out of the house and hide in the back seat of the family's 1957 red-and-white Chevrolet, waiting until his father had shifted into gear and driven a few blocks before making his presence known. Cherry let Tom accompany him when there was Klan grunt work to do, such as tacking up George Wallace posters or printing up bumper stickers protesting school integration; when he needed an extra hand silk-screening rebel flags at the Modern Sign Company on the morning of September 15, 1963, Tom came too.
Investigators believe that the eleven sticks of dynamite, bound together with a timing device in olive-colored paper, had been planted at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church the previous evening. Tom cannot recall if his father was home, as Cherry would later claim, or if he was absent that night. What Tom does remember is standing inside the Modern Sign Company on the morning of the bombing, only a few blocks from the church, and hearing a dull rumble that shook the silk-screens from their frames. "There was the sound of an explosion — a whoomph — and I knew something real bad had happened," said Tom. "It was a day you never forget."
ADDIE MAE COLLINS, DENISE MCNAIR, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley were popular and vivacious girls, all but one the daughters of Birmingham schoolteachers, who had left their Sunday school classes a few minutes early that morning so they could freshen up before the service. While the congregation gathered in the main sanctuary, the four girls hurried to the ladies' lounge in the church basement — past the eleven sticks of dynamite, which lay on the opposite side of the church wall, obscured by a flight of concrete stairs. A survivor later recounted how the girls had stood quietly in front of the long mirror in the lounge, appraising their reflections as they combed their hair and smoothed out the folds in their crisp white dresses. At 10:22 a.m., as Denise McNair reached to tie Addie Mae Collins' sash, there was a sudden, thunderous blast. A wave of heat surged through the building as its brick-and-limestone frame buckled, the force of dynamite toppling the base of the church's eastern wall and raining plaster, wood, and stained glass onto the worshipers below. There was a moment of stunned silence in the sanctuary, and then, as smoke began to billow from the basement, someone screamed, "We've been bombed!"
The haunting image that would appear on the cover of Time the following week was that of a stained-glass window: The body of Jesus, surrounded by young children, remained intact — but the explosion had left a gaping hole where His face had once smiled benevolently down upon them. In the moments after the blast, churchgoers felt their way through the haze of smoke and soot in the sanctuary, while an angry crowd gathered outside and waited to count the dead. The four girls had not stood a chance: The force of the blast had blown out windows several blocks away and crushed two nearby cars, crumpling them like tin cans. One of the girls was decapitated by the force of the explosion, another killed by a brick that lodged in her skull; Addie Mae Collins was so disfigured that her older sister could identify her only by her small brown shoes. Churchgoers wailed as first one body, then a second, and then a third and fourth, were pulled from the debris and covered with white sheets. Dazed and weeping, the Reverend John Haywood Cross walked through the rubble, quoting the sermon he would never deliver. "Father, forgive them," he said, his face streaked with tears, "for they know not what they do."
The bombing, with its stark images of good and evil — the four girls in white dresses, murdered undoubtedly by the Klan — touched off riots in the streets of Birmingham and sympathy among even the most implacable of whites. Governor Wallace sent three hundred state troopers into the city to keep order, while Martin Luther King, Jr., wired President Kennedy, insisting that only decisive federal intervention could prevent "the worst racial holocaust this nation has ever seen." The mayor of Birmingham openly wept, and even in Ensley, where white residents had opted to fill up the community swimming pool with concrete rather than integrate it, the mood seemed to have shifted. "Before then, everybody in the neighborhood used to talk about how Bob Cherry was the coolest guy around," remembered Tom. "He stood up for what he thought, you know, and they all backed him. But then it became socially unacceptable. And I think where it became socially unacceptable was when those kids were killed. That turned people's stomachs. Because no matter who you are, or what color you are, when a kid is killed, it throws a different light on things. You can't ignore that. That's when it all went bad."
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