Church Bombing Trial 38 Years Late

The trial of a former Ku Klux Klan member charged in the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls is underway in Birmingham. The trial did not take place in 1963 largely because Southern justice did not yet provide for the just or fair prosecution of criminal acts if they served to buttress the social, economic and racial status quo, says UAB professor and Ku Klux Klan expert Glenn Feldman, Ph.D., author of "Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949." "Most law enforcement officers, attorneys, judges and jurors in the South were still sympathetic with, if not the methods of groups such as the KKK, then certainly their goals." But for many white Southerners, the act dissolved the line between support for the preservation of segregation and the unspeakable violence of militant white supremacists. "The bombing brought home the horror and barbarity that served as the ultimate underpinning for a whole way of life." Contact Jennifer Park, Media Relations, 205-934-3888 or [email protected].