Opinion: Justice in Birmingham

Bobby Frank Cherry looks like a harmless old man today. The other men who conspired with Cherry to bomb a black church in Birmingham 38 years ago are either elderly or dead. The perverse energy that fueled their racial hatred is mostly burned out now.

Birmingham, Ala., and most of the rest of the South has changed in the past 38 years, too. The virulent racism of people like Cherry used to be epidemic in the region. Today, it has been all but eradicated. Racial prejudice still exists, of course, but the dominant strain has become more subtle, more genteel.

The terrible crime committed by Cherry, "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss and their co-conspirators had much to do with shocking the dominant white culture of the South out of its complacency. For generations, even most peaceful, tolerant white people chose to look the other way rather than confront the malignant racism in their midst. Their faltering courage was understandable; white people who stood up for the rights of their black neighbors often were punished even more grievously than blacks were. But their failure to act allowed the racial violence to escalate.

So many other innocent people were killed, so many other homes and houses of worship were firebombed, without changing the course of history. But the bombing of a prominent black church in Birmingham, killing four young girls in their Sunday dresses, was an act of savagery that respectable white citizens could not so easily dismiss. As the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. predicted at the time, the attack on the 16th Street Baptist Church "cause(d) the white South to come to terms with its conscience."

Or at least enough of the white South to matter. Consciences can be evanescent, and memories can be short.

People too young, or too myopic, to understand the crucible from which the civil rights movement emerged may wonder today why so much attention was given to the trial of an addled, aging man in Birmingham. They may find it unremarkable that a predominantly white jury in Alabama found an old Klansman guilty of the murders of four black girls. Those who know better -- those who remember the time not so long ago when such a verdict would have been inconceivable -- have a duty to explain to them why it is so important that justice was done, even if 38 years too late.

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