A Tale of Two FBI's

Sunday is the 50th Anniversary of the bombing.

The way the FBI tells it in their news release, it was "reluctant witnesses and a lack of prosecutable evidence" that made finding and prosecuting the 16th Street Church bombers tough.

If you listen to former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley, who reopened the bombing probe in 1977, he'll tell you it was the FBI that was reluctant to share files with him. 

From an excellent NPR story by Debbie Elliott on Tuesday:


Baxley turned to the FBI, but he hit a wall.
"Deep South public office holders up to that time had not been people you would cooperate with on civil rights cases," he says.
It would take J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972 and media pressure for Baxley to finally gain limited access to the FBI's church bombing files.

And of course everyone knows how little the local Birmingham authorities tried to solve it.
There were too many Klan members in the Police Department for that to happen.

And of course, the FBI had infiltrators planted inside the Klan, but even that didn't result in arrests in the years after the bombing.