Civil Rights: Farce in Birmingham

“It was a farce,” complained an aide of the Rev. Martin Luther King. And so it was. With the perfunctory trial and hand-slap conviction of three white roughnecks in a city court last week, another empty charade staged by Ala bama’s Democratic Governor George Wallace was played out.

It started with a portentous announcement from the Governor’s office two weeks ago as FBI agents probed deep into the bombing that killed four Negro girls at a Birmingham church (TIME, Sept. 27). “State investigators,” Wallace boasted, “expect to break the Birmingham church case within the next few hours.”

Too Little, Too Soon. Sure enough. Within hours, two men were arrested by Wallace’s troopers. One was a red neck truck driver named Robert E. Chambliss, 59, an incorporator of Alabama’s Ku Klux Klan who was indicted, then acquitted, in 1949 for flogging a white man while masked. The other was Charles Cagle, 22, a laborer who was arrested last June for carrying a concealed weapon as he went to a Klan rally near Tuscaloosa. Later Wallace’s police arrested Truck Driver John W. Hall, 36.

The FBI and other law enforcement agencies had already had their eyes on the three men; they complained that by ordering his troopers to jump in with premature arrests, the Governor had all but ruined the chance that the three could ever be convicted of the church bombing. And that was the way it turned out. Without sufficient evidence of the bombing, Wallace’s officials finally settled for a charge of illegally possessing dynamite, a misdemeanor about as common in Birmingham as jaywalking in many a U.S. city.

Last week Chambliss, Cagle and Hall each were sentenced to serve 180 days in jail and pay fines of $100. All, however, have been released on $300 bond pending appeal to county court.

“Bigger, More Determined.” Also in the aftermath of the Sunday school bombing, a county grand jury indicted two 16-year-old white boys, Michael Lee Farley and Larry Joe Sims, for first-degree murder in the death of a 13-year-old Negro, Virgil Ware. In the disorders that followed the church deaths, Virgil was shot as he rode on the handle bars of his brother’s bicycle. The grand jury refused to indict Birmingham Policeman Jack Parker for the fatal shooting of another Negro teenager, Johnny Robinson, 16, who was part of a group that stoned white men’s cars in the post-bombing riot.

Just before the jury acted, Presidential Peacemakers Kenneth Roy all, former Army Secretary, and Earl Blaik, former West Point football coach, returned from Birmingham to Washington to talk with Kennedy. Both remained tight-lipped about their findings and recommendations, pending a final report to the President this week, but they offered vague reassurances that Birmingham tensions are easing. In Birmingham itself, that hardly seemed the case. The city council last week rejected a demand by Martin Luther King that Birmingham hire 25 Negro cops within two weeks. King had promised in advance that such a rejection would bring “bigger and more determined” demonstrations than ever.