[ominous music]
- It was probably the most important case
that I've ever worked on.
- And we had the chance...
- [Bill and Ben]: To change history.
[clock tick-tock]
[reporter]: As worshippers gathered for church on a Sunday morning...
[loud explosion]
exploding dynamite shattered Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church.
- That church had really become a symbol, as one of the largest,
most active black churches in Birmingham.
[reporter]: The church had served as a staging area for
the city's Civil Rights Movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
[Doug]: Birmingham was known as "Bombingham"
because of bombings in the black neighborhood.
- 41 since the end of World War II. [Doug]: Yeah.
[reporter]: Four young girls dressing for the choir were killed.
- The FBI flooded Birmingham with agents.
They interviewed Klans members, Klans members' wives.
[Kristy]: Individuals that we'd already identified from previous intelligence gathering.
[reporter]: The tragedy became a symbol of the violent
and bitter Civil Rights era in the South.
[suspenseful music]
- These were four innocent little girls that died
because of the color of their skin.
And that was something that really shook the conscience of the country.
[journalist]: In Washington, the government has now ordered
a new look into the racially motivated bombing
of a Black church in Birmingham, Alabama, more than three decades ago.
[reporter]: One man was convicted, but police believe several others got away.
- This is absolutely the last time it can be investigated.
because we were losing too many witnesses, too many suspects.
- The people that bomb and kill our innocent citizens and
children, we will never give up.
[narrator]: In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
Drug busts, mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
[people shouting]
We understand why people want to tell stories about us,
- Mark it! - Freeze!
- FBI.
- FBI! [man in the distance]: Action!
[narrator]: But they don't know the half of it.
What really goes down?
We save that for each other whn we're talking agent to agent.
This is FBI, True.
- 60 years ago, September 15th, 1963.
[narrator]: Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FB.
She worked gangs, crimes againt children as well as human
and drug trafficking.
- Ben, where were you?
- I was nine years old, and I was at home.
It was a Sunday.
[narrator]: Birmingham, Alabama, native Ben Herren
served on his hometown's police department for nearly
two decades, before being tapped to join the FBI's
reinvestigation of the 16th street Baptist church bombing.
- Did your parents speak of the bombing at all or...
- I was pretty much shielded.
- Doug, how about you? Where were you?
- It's really similar to Ben because we actually
grew up not far from each other.
[narrator]: Doug Jones was appointed as the United States
Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama in 1997.
20 years later, he was elected U.S. Senator
for Alabama, a role he held until 2021.
- And when he says shielded,
I think that that is the real key.
I mean, you got to understand, in those days,
these were very segregated neighborhoods.
[reporter]: Birmingham is the largest segregated city in the South.
Every phase of activity; business, cultural and social is segregated.
- And Bill, how about you? Where were you on that day?
- Well, I wasn't living in Birmingham at the time.
I was living in Albany, Georgia.
But attitudes were very similar to the attitudes in Birmingham.
[narrator]: Bill Fleming is a 33-year-veteran of the FBI.
Based in the Birmingham field office,
he focused on civil rights cass in the latter years
of his career.
[ominous music]
- The victims in this blast.
Who are they?
- There were four children.
They were dressed in their finest dresses and
they were going down to the restroom right before church
to spiffy up, to clean up a little bit.
[stressful music]
Three of them were 14 years old.
You had Addie Mae Collins,
Carole Robinson,
Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair.
She was the youngest of them.
There was another girl that was down there,
which was the sister of Addie Mae.
She was actually at the sink and she was not killed,
but one of her eyes was actually blinded.
[sinister music]
- So how big was this explosion?
- The bomb was pretty powerful.
I mean, it was placed underneath the bottom step
of some concrete steps that led on the outside of the building.
[explosion]
[riveting music]
- And on the other side of the wall was the little girl's bathroom.
And with the steps, it just made the perfect explosion
because all of it went sideways into the church
and across the street and into the cars.
And it went down.
There was a crater at least five feet deep.
- What about the rest of the church structure itself?
- There was...one interesting scene was the...
it had a big glass... - Stained glass.
- Stained glass of Jesus.
And the main damage was the face of Jesus was blown out.
It was like, He couldn't bear to see it.
- Yeah. - Couldn't bear to witness it.
- Doug, so how did the families find out about the victims?
- In different ways.
Maxine McNair had taken Denise that morning and Maxine
was in her Sunday-school class, which was right above
where the bomb exploded.
So when she heard the bomb, they really weren't sure
if it was a bomb.
She said that it might have been a plane crash.
But all she knew was it was coming from below there.
And she just screamed out: "My baby! My baby!"
Denise's father went to the church only to be told
he needed to go to the hospital, the makeshift morgue.
That's where he identified Denise, his only daughter.
Ms. Robertson was at home, they lived a few blocks away,
and Carole had come earlier.
So Ms. Robertson was getting dressed for the church service
when she heard the blast.
And she said that it sounded like the whole world was shaking.
It did.
- There was one bomb technician from headquarters
that was put on a military plane flown to Birmingham,
and he was there within two hours after the bomb went off
so that he could start the investigation of the bombing.
[violin sad music]
- And in fact the State swooped in
and tried to investigate.
But they spend all their time trying to prove that members
of the Black community bombed that church to try to get
sympathy for the civil rights movement.
- So instead of investigating the facts
as they were laying out, they instead tried to build
an inculpatory case for, basically the Klan?
- Exactly. - What's the federal response?
- Mr. Hoover sent 50 agents in Birmingham.
- It's a full on investigative endeavor. - Oh, yes.
- Big time. - Major.
Major, probably the biggest one the bureau had worked.
Even though we didn't, per se, have a direct connection
to that crime because it was a state offense at that time.
[sad music]
- As we're leading up into the bombing, the significance
of 1963 cannot be overemphasized.
You know, it was in the spring of 1963
that the Children's Marches occurred...
[dramatic music]
and they would meet inside the church and literally
go into the intersection outside...
before Bull Connor hit them with fire hoses and dogs.
Bull Connor was the police commissioner.
He was an old, racist public servant and he literally
is the one who set the fire hoses and dogs on the kids.
And then in the summer,
in August, the "I Have a Dream" speech,
Dr. King's speech on the Mall.
- One day right down in Alabama, little Black boys
and Black girls will be able to join hands with little white
boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.
I have a dream today.
- And there was a lot of hope in the air for civil rights at the time.
But in Birmingham, the lawsuit that had been filed
to desegregate the schools was finished and the Birmingham
city schools were desegregated five days before this bombing.
It's a cliche to say it, but with what happened,
but Birmingham literally was like a powder keg
because of school desegregation at that point.
- And I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever.
[crowd chanting]: Two, four, six, eight, we don't want to integrate.
- And it was on that Sunday, the 15th where that powder keg got lit.
[explosion]
- Bill, give me a little idea of what the FBI agents
and all the assets that the FBI sent to Birmingham,
what are they doing at this time?
- They are going through talking to the Klan.
They're talking to people that we had cases on already
just because they were members of the Klan.
- You know, Birmingham had like 13 or 14 different klaverns,
which were Klan chapters.
They quickly developed suspects.
I mean, there was a group that was pretty violent.
They were known as the Cahaba River Bridge Boys
and they would meet under a bridge in Birmingham.
People like Bobby Frank Cherry.
[slow music]
Tommy Blanton...
and that ringleader was a guy named Robert Chambliss.
He was known as "Dynamite Bob".
He was thought to be involved in a number of the bombings in Birmingham.
[suspenseful music]
And they would interview these guys and they would talk
to each other and they would be inconsistent.
And so they really were able to focus on
the Cahaba River Bridge boys as the prime suspects in the bombing.
- This investigation started in 1963.
Do we get any convictions at this point?
- No. - What happens?
- The bureau spent an incredible amount of resources,
but in those days, there was really only a five-year statute
of limitations for civil rights deaths.
And so in 1968, there had been no indictments,
and J. Edgar Hoover closes the case.
I think everybody had a really good idea who committed
this bombing, but there was just not enough that could be used
in a court of law.
[sad music]
And you had an all-white jury, all male white jury,
and they would have never convicted those guys.
- And one of them would have been a Klansman in all likelihood.
- Now, I know there was a lot of controversy
when the FBI did close that case.
A lot of people may have felt the bureau's not interested
and Mr. Hoover's just closing this case.
- And that's really unfair.
It really is.
I'm no defender of Hoover.
But the fact of the matter is that the bureau put forth a lot of effort.
There was this, this code of silence among the Klansmen.
And you didn't have any DNA type stuff.
You didn't really have anything that could connect anybody,
per se.
- When does this case get brought back up again?
- The first time it gets brought back up again is by
the Alabama Attorney General, Bill Baxley.
He reopened the case in 1971 when he was sworn in.
- The FBI is not involved at this point?
- No. - We might have given them some documents
or let them review files. Something like that.
- Let's be candid.
At that time, the FBI didn't cooperate with Baxley.
- You know, you've got to remember, though, George Wallace
was still the governor of Alabama.
- Right. - And you had a young attorney general who was pretty
progressive wanting to do this, but the FBI didn't trust
the state of Alabama and they didn't like giving out their files.
This was mainly a state case with some FBI assistance,
but very little.
- Attorney General Bill Baxley acknowledged today
that the investigation of the 1963 Birmingham church bombing has been reopened.
But in the Attorney General's words: "there are some people
in Jefferson County who ought to be pretty nervous right now."
- It took several years for Bill Baxley's team
to really get the evidence to indict one individual, Robert Chambliss.
[suspenseful music]
And they only had enough evidence based on the testimony
of a niece of Robert Chambliss's, the girlfriend of one
of the other Klansmen, and a couple of other people.
[reporter]: Mrs. Cobbs related a conversation she said
she had with Chambliss the day before the bombing
of the 16th Street Baptist Church.
[reporter]: Mrs. Cobbs said she was watching television
with Chambliss a week later, when a news report
on the church bombing investigation came on.
She described his reaction as he watched the report.
- They tried the case in Birmingham.
Baxley personally tried the case along with a couple of others.
At the time, in 1977, I was a second-year law student
in Birmingham, and I wanted to be a trial lawyer.
And so I cut classes and went and watched that trial.
Baxley elected to only charge on the murder of Denise McNair.
They believed at the time that if they only charged
one death and he was acquitted, that they might,
could then go back and charge the others.
And ultimately, Chambliss was convicted.
- We've been talking about the past generations
of investigative teams.
Tell me about your generation of FBI and how it gets involved.
- In the early nineties, the Bureau and
the Black community in Birmingham
had gotten a little bit at odds.
And SAC Rob Langford started going to some of the black churches.
And at one meeting with some of these black leaders,
they said: "we'd like for you to take a look"
at the 16th street Baptist church bombing.
We know that more than Robert Chambliss was involved.
- And Mr. Langford, he called me and he said, told me
he was considering reopening the 16th Street Church Bombing.
- Okay. - And he said:
"I would like you to, to be in charge of it."
And of course, I was not exactly excited...
- Why not? - Because I looked at it
as a 33-year-old case with nobody coming forward,
with no new evidence being discovered,
with no smoking gun, nothing.
- Ben, tell me about when you become involved in this case directly.
- Well, in 1995 I was the detective sergeant
in the burglary unit.
My beeper goes off at the time and it tells me
to report to the chief's office.
And he tells me, says:
"Ben, I want you to go over and meet with the FBI.
And they're talking about reopening the 16th Street Church case
and just see if it's feasible".
And the chief ask me: "What do you think about it"
I said: "well? I really don't think we have
a lot of chance to convict somebody, but this is absolutely
the last time it can be investigated because we were losing too many witnesses,
too many suspects, and if we're going to do it, let's do it right."
And I go over to that meeting and I look around
and it's Bill and I, we are the task force.
[Bill laughs] - Oh!
- And that's how we got started in it.
- As you're going through the file,
what do you decide is the first or next step?
- Well, the first thing that we wanted to do
is familiarize yourself with the old investigation.
All the files, probably 10,000 documents we had to go through.
- What do you learn about Bobby Frank Cherry
in those original case files?
- Cherry is all over the board, but he's making
certain admissions about being at the Modern Sign Shop
where they were all gathered the night before this bombing
and that Blanton was there, that Robert Chambliss
and others were there.
- And I thought the best opportunity at the time
would be interview Cherry first.
And we had to keep it a secret from the press,
from other police departments, from everybody else.
So we could hit Cherry cold.
[reporter]: Flanked by his attorney, and followed by
cameras, Bobby Frank Cherry, a former Klansman,
came here to answer questions about his past.
- He is saying: "the FBI is bothering me again.
It's been 30 years and they have been harassing me all my life".
- When Bob Cherry called that press conference
that's when the phone started ringing.
- The phone rings and I answer it, and it's Cherry's granddaughter.
She related that on numerous family events
that Cherry would brag about blowing up the church.
- In 1963, there was electronic surveillance everywhere.
The FBI was monitoring Blanton and we knew that there was
some significant information in these tapes.
We just didn't know where the hell the tapes were.
- I see this box by the corner, like it's fixing to be thrown
in the trash and there's eight tapes, in there.
- And as I start saying: "Doug on the tape...",
He says "Stop, stop, stop. Don't tell me."
- We may not be able to use the tapes.
And because you've heard them, you may get tainted
for the rest of the investigation.
I'm thinking: "I'm out of the case now".
Subtitling: difuze