The Last Living Church Bomber, Unrepentant, Dies in Prison.

     No matter how terrible a person was during life, there are surely some people, somewhere, who will mourn the death of 82 year old Thomas Blanton. But they will certainly be few.

     Blanton was one of the four white men who bombed the 16h Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, killing four little girls who were in the basement, waiting for services to begin. 

     Blanton never asked for forgiveness. He was prosecuted by then U.S. Attorney, and now Democratic U.S. Senator Doug Jones, who issued this statement today:

“Tommy Blanton is responsible for one of the darkest days in Alabama’s history, and he will go to his resting place without ever having atoned for his actions or apologizing to the countless people he hurt. The fact that after the bombing, he went on to remain a free man for nearly four decades speaks to a broader systemic failure to hold him and his accomplices accountable. That he died at this moment, when the country is trying to reconcile the multi-generational failure to end systemic racism, seems fitting. However, what the families of those girls, and the entire community of Birmingham, do know today is that when we come together and demand justice, we can achieve it. At this moment in our nation when we have all come to realize that the journey to racial justice has taken far too long, we must come together. Tommy Blanton may be gone, but we still have work to do.”

     One of the first big news stories I covered when I first moved to Alabama was the 1977 trial of one of the other bombers, "Dynamite" Bob Chambliss. 

     He was prosecuted by then Attorney General Bill Baxley, and died in prison in 1985.

     I still remember the drama of the guilty verdict being delivered by the jury in the Jefferson County Courthouse that day. Justice was served, though 22 years after the fact.