March on Washington 93decapitated. Denise’s sobbing grandfather stumbled across her white dress
shoe amid the debris, and shouted, ‘I’d like to blow the whole town up!’
A black woman whose feet were covered with glass screamed, ‘In church!
My God, you’re not even safe in church.’ Such pathos left a local white
supremacist untouched: ‘They’re just little niggers... and if there’s four less
niggers tonight, then I say, Good for whoever planted the bomb!’
With roving bands of armed black and white vigilantes, the city was
poised for a race war. Hundreds of angry blacks set white businesses afire
and threw stones at the police. A policeman fatally shot 16-year-old Johnny
Robinson in the back for tossing rocks at a car covered with racial slurs. That
same day, Larry Joe Sims, a white Eagle Scout with a straight-A average,
attended Sunday school in the morning and a segregationist rally in the after-
noon before fatally shooting 13-year-old Virgil Ware, who was perched on
his brother’s bicycle handlebars. Although Sims confessed to the shooting, he
served only a short time in a juvenile detention center before being released
on probation.
To find the men behind the church bombing, FBI agents launched the
nation’s greatest manhunt since gangster John Dillinger was gunned down
in 1934. The investigation produced several plausible suspects, including
‘Dynamite Bob’ Chambliss, a 59-year-old truck driver and klansman whose
hit squad had flogged blacks and bombed their homes. FBI director J. Edgar
Hoover opposed prosecution because his agents could not nail down an
airtight case. The state police made three arrests, including the volatile
Chambliss, but the charge was possessing dynamite, a misdemeanor offense.
In any event, no indictments ensued. Thanks to a dogged state attorney gen-
eral, Chambliss was convicted of murder in 1977, and two accomplices were
sent to prison almost forty years after the killings.
Not even the sickening Birmingham murders could spring Kennedy’s civil
rights bill, which faced an uncertain future on Capitol Hill. When Kennedy
was assassinated in November 1963, few assumed that his successor –
Lyndon Johnson of Texas – would break the back of segregation. Johnson,
after all, opposed Truman’s initiatives to end lynching and the poll tax and
neutered key provisions of Eisenhower’s civil rights bills. Deep down,
Johnson considered segregation to be an immoral system that retarded the
South’s economic advancement. Moreover, he had seen poverty cripple the
lives of blacks and Latinos and ‘vowed that if I ever had the power I’d make
sure every Negro had the same chance as every white man. Now I have it.
And I’m going to use it.’ Johnson realized that civil rights was the litmus test
of his leadership, and without a strong bill, liberals would be gunning for
him. ‘I’d be dead before I could even begin,’ he admitted. In a memorial ora-
tion for his slain predecessor, Johnson wholeheartedly embraced the move-
ment: ‘We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We
Chambliss, Bob(1904–
85): Birmingham klans-
man who murdered four
black girls in their church.