Blood, Murder and Redemption: Part 2
By Andrew Beck Grace

Bobby Frank Cherry sat alone at the defense table on Wednesday morning in the basement courtroom of the Criminal Justice building in Birmingham, Ala. No lawyers, jurors or bailiffs surrounded him. He was stoic, facing the empty judge’s bench, his back to the gallery where reporters, family members, community leaders, civil-rights activists and onlookers sat chatting with one another as the jurors deliberated his fate in a room just yards away.

The day before, the mostly white jury had heard closing statements and had begun deliberating the case of the 71-year-old accused of planting a bomb that blew up the ladies' lounge of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963, as five black girls primped for Youth Sunday. Four of them, Denise McNair, 11, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson and Cynthia Wesley, all 14, were killed in the blast. The only survivor, Sarah Collins Rudolph, lost an eye and a sister.

A solitary ceiling fan, spinning lethargically above Cherry’s head, was the only piece of stereotypical Southern iconography in the drab modern courtroom. The room, like the South itself, has moved on. But Cherry, who in a 1997 interview with the FBI made statements that his kids will still never go to school with "niggers" and that he thinks "Birmingham is a little Africa — more niggers than whites," seems not to have kept up with the changes. In the same interview, Cherry bragged about two incidents where he beat up blacks — one where he split open a black man's head with the butt of a pistol, and another when he attacked the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth as he tried to enroll his children at an all-white school in 1957. Referring to the pistol-whipping, Cherry said, "The statute of limitations has run out on that one."

The defense’s case to keep their client out of jail for the rest of his life took only a day and a half. They attempted to show that Cherry had been unfairly lumped into a group of suspects, that he was not a racist (at least not anymore), and that he had recently helped raise two fine boys. In doing so they called a witness who impeached herself; a former Klansman who under cross-examination admitted to lying to the FBI; one of Cherry's grandsons, who said his grandfather didn't use racial slurs, unless you count the word "nigger"; and a preacher from a biracial nondenominational church Cherry allegedly attends who admitted to occasionally using racial slurs and once having had ambitions of joining the Klan — that is, before he became a man of God.

The most important and recurring strategy of the defense was an attempt to garner sympathy for Cherry as a wrongly accused target of government harassment during the almost 39-year investigation. Mickey Johnson, the lead attorney for Cherry, repeatedly suggested that the government's case was concocted of false information, and that the FBI unilaterally disregarded information about suspects other than the four primaries.

When Bill Fleming, one of the main FBI agents to handle the reopening of the case in 1997, was called to the stand, Johnson accused him of downplaying leads not based around primary suspects. "If you’re talking about one of our suspects, we'll listen to you, but if you're not ...," Johnson said sarcastically to Fleming. Later, in an interview after trying his case, Johnson complained that the media were also to blame for the perpetuation of the "lie" that Cherry was guilty.

In the courtroom Johnson tempered his argument through imagery and sentiment. Cherry’s 20-year-old grandson, Glenn Belcher, who was called as a character witness, showed up to testify in his Air Force uniform, his short black hair slicked back smoothly like in pictures of his grandfather from the 1950s. When Johnson asked, "Do you know the defendant?" he answered in an innocent Texas drawl, "He's my grandpa."

After the defense rested Monday afternoon, the judge ordered summation for Tuesday morning. The prosecution's closing statements attempted to weave the largely circumstantial evidence together and show that Cherry attended a meeting where the bomb was planned. It also reiterated the fact that Cherry lied to the FBI about his whereabouts, his friends and his knowledge of the crime.

But the most effective tool of the prosecution was also imagery and sentiment. Don Cochran, who gave the first of the two-part summation for the prosecution, displayed an image seen repeatedly during the trial — a photograph of Denise McNair, taken by her father. She's standing in her bedroom smiling innocently at the camera, hugging a white-skinned Chatty Kathy doll close to her chest. "Denise didn't understand that she was supposed to hate that doll," said Cochran.

The defense's closing statements reiterated the premise that this entire investigation into Cherry was botched from the very beginning. Referring to an FBI document that has proved to be false, upon which the defense claimed the prosecution's entire case relied, Johnson said, "I still want to hold to the belief that our public officials don't make up stuff like that."

Johnson then went on a tirade about the trying of this case by the state of Alabama. "We're talking about a state that elected their governor on the platform of segregation," he said, prowling before the jury box. "That same state government wants to come in here now and convince you how distasteful it was to believe in segregation?

"More time has been spent here throwing the N-word around than has been spent talking about the proof of what happened in 1963," he continued.

Jones, who had skipped law school classes to attend the first Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing trial of Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss and who has served as lead prosecutor for the Blanton and Cherry cases, stood solemnly in front of the jury giving the prosecution's final closing statements for what is likely to be the last civil-rights era case in Alabama. He appealed to the jury's humanity, offering to them the history of hatred from this confused city. "Is nothing sacred in Birmingham, Alabama, where innocent children can't go to worship without feeling fear of death?" And he appealed to the jury's contemporary fears, calling Cherry and his Klan brothers the "forefathers of terrorism."

But in the end, Jones, like Cochran, referred back to the beautiful and innocent face of Denise McNair, holding her white doll.

"It is an image I believe that captures everything about this case," he said, standing in front of the photograph blown up onto a large screen, staring into the eyes of the jurors. "It is an image of innocence, but also of the reason she died." A little over six hours after the jury began deliberations, they came back with a verdict. The foreperson, a short, middle-aged white woman, read slowly, sweeping her eyes out into the gallery before saying "Guilty." She repeated the word four times — one for each count of murder in the first degree. Each count holds an automatic life sentence.

Cherry stood beneath the slow-moving fan, his monolithic posture unmoved as she read the words. He displayed no emotion. The handcuffs seemed unusually loud as they snapped around his wrinkled wrists.

As the crowd spilled out of the building and into the street, cameras, microphones and throngs of reporters surrounded practically every person with dark skin. The family members expressed relief, and aging civil-rights leader Shuttlesworth gave an impromptu homily about the trial and the justice delayed.

"It's almost 40 years," he said, as reporters shoved microphones and cameras into his face, "but God left the children of Israel 40 years in the desert, not because he couldn't get them out sooner, but because he wanted to drain slavery from their bones."

Sarah Collins Rudolph, who now lives with one glass eye from the bombing, stood near Shuttlesworth, looking more tired than anything else. She seemed unsure what to say.

"I know one thing," she finally said, "it was a long time."

E-mail Andrew Beck Grace at andrewbeckgrace@hotmail.com.

— graphic by Carl Durbridge (carl@fuzzynet.co.uk)