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Editorial
News & Letters, June 2001
Birmingham verdicts leave out FBI
Hallelujah. An Alabama jury convicted Thomas E. Blanton who, as a member of
the Ku Klux Klan in 1963, helped blow up the 16th Street Baptist Church in
Birmingham, Ala. The blast killed four little girls, ages 11 to 14, and
maimed a fifth child. Another 21 people were injured. Blanton and another
Klaner, Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, were suspects ever since the
blast, but not until 1977 was Chambliss convicted and it took almost four
decades to try Blanton. Evidence belatedly turned over by the FBI led to
Chambliss's conviction, and only now did a crucial piece of FBI evidence
surface to convict Blanton, 1964 of audio tape of the killers' account of
the deed.
BIRMINGHAM AND FOUR LITTLE GIRLS
A look at Birmingham and the world which was watching it in the 1960s
discloses revolution and counter-revolution. Ever since a successful bus
boycott to end segregation in 1956, white Birmingham city officials passed
a series of ordinances to bolster it. 1962 saw a mobilization of Black
Birmingham determined to wipe away segregation once and for all.
Rather than give in, the city closed public facilities and stopped relief
programs, even at the expense of white working families. Infamous police
commissioner "Bull" Conner stepped up a reign of terror. In late Spring
1963, some 750 Black youth were jailed in the largest protest against
segregation ever. After six days, 3,000 crammed into the filthy Birmingham
prisons, arrested in non-violent protests. Fully half were children. When
white businessmen, whose stores had been boycotted for months, showed signs
of bending to the demands of the protests, racist reaction was swift.
Bombs ripped through the headquarters of the integrationists and the home
of Martin Luther King's brother. High pressure hoses and police dogs
unleashed on demonstrators were captured in unforgettable images flashed
around the world. Rather than defending the Black populace of Birmingham,
U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy questioned the timing of the protests,
as if they could wait. When Alabama Governor George Wallace chose to close
public schools rather than integrate them in the fall, not all white
Alabamans went along with him, including angry parents.
In that atmosphere of treason fomented by Wallace and other
segregationists, the ilk of Blanton and Chambliss felt emboldened to
further terrorize Black Birmingham. On Sept. 15, 1963, the 16th Street
Baptist Church was bombed. Less well known are the police murder of Johnny
Robinson and white mob slaying of Vigil Ware at that time.
FBI--DOGS OF COUNTER-REVOLUTION
With its eyes and ears inside the KKK, why didn't the FBI intervene to stop
the bombing in 1963? This was not the only time it considered the Freedom
Now! movement more of a threat than murderous racists. The FBI allowed a
white mob to set upon a bus carrying Freedom Riders in 1961. The passengers
were beaten, leaving an activist paralyzed, and the bus torched. The same
FBI, at the behest of the attorney general, spied on civil rights figures,
even tapping the phone lines of Martin Luther King Jr. Failing to bring
forth the audio tape incriminating Blanton until now continues such a
tradition of racism and repression.
Louis Freeh's FBI participated in the bogus and racist spy hunt against Wen
Ho Lee, a Taiwan-born U.S. citizen and defense department employee. Lee was
virtually exonerated last year. Also last year, a chillingly unprecedented
public rally by FBI agents in the nation's capital denounced the possible
clemency for Native American political prisoner Leonard Peltier.
After the bombing of the Olympic festival in predominantly Black Atlanta in
1996, white supremacist Eric Rudolph made his getaway. Meanwhile the FBI,
in self-imposed impotence, tried coercing a confession out of a security
guard. Rudolph was later linked to the bombing of a Birmingham women's
clinic which killed a guard and maimed a nurse.
And despite Congress's showy denunciations of the FBI assaults on white
supremacists at Ruby Ridge, Idaho,and religious fanatics and their children
in Waco, Texas, it throws more money at the bureau which has doubled in
size in the 1990s and opened shop abroad to throttle movements there.
FREEDOM, THEN AND NOW
If U.S. rulers are finding more counterrevolutionary jobs for the FBI, it
is because aspirations for freedom are multiplying, including at home. Take
George W. Bush's dubious path to the White House which outflanked the
Voting Rights Act of 1965. The names of eligible voters were purged from
voter registration rolls. Not surprisingly, Black and poor citizens found
themselves disenfranchised the most.
Nevertheless, the recent Cincinnati rebellion and protests against the
World Trade Organization, along with persistent and growing community
movements against police repression, have exposed dot.com fairy tales and
bourgeois lies about social and economic progress abroad and at home.
As the 1963 events unfolded, we published American Civilization on Trial,
the first true history of Black struggles for freedom and their moments of
coalescence with all freedom struggles. It showed the underlying humanism
of the new freedom movements, and posed the need to preserve and advance
these movements as a philosophy of revolution. Because that need for "the
power of negativity" persists still, we plan to issue a new edition of
American Civilization on Trial for today's movements.
Picture: Four girls killed in Birmingham, 1963: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia
Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair
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