On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, at approximately 10:24 a.m., a bomb exploded in the stairwell of a venerable African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young women were killed instantly and more than a dozen other people were injured.

Our Birmingham office responded immediately and notified FBI Headquarters less than two hours after the attack. The FBI immediately mobilized resources for the investigation, flying experts to Birmingham on military jet and redirecting personnel from other offices. Since this was a major case, the Bureau called the investigation BAPBOMB as an administrative short-cut for reports, teletypes, and other internal communications.

Although the Bureau quickly identified likely suspects, a lack of admissible evidence and other factors meant that prosecutions could not be achieved during the 1960s. The Bureau's investigation lasted for decades, closing for the first time in the early 1970s.

In 1977, the state of Alabama, using its own reinvestigation of the matter and evidence from the FBI's earlier investigation, successfully prosecuted Robert Chambliss for the crime. The FBI reopened its investigation in 1997 after receiving new evidence in the matter. Subsequently, Thomas Blanton, Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry were convicted in 2001 for their roles in the bombing. A fourth bomber died before he could be brought before the courts to answer for his role in the bombing.

The delay in successful prosecution has generated some controversy, in part because of disagreements with former Alabama Attorney General William Baxley over who should have access to case information and how this should be handled. Our understanding of these matters and its actions in relation to Baxley's efforts in the 1970s are clearly presented in the files linked below (see Section 10 for documents on this controversy).

The files linked to below consist of approximately 3,400 pages from the FBI Headquarters file, 157-1025. These pages describe the FBI's long investigation of this case from that tragic September morning through 1980 when our investigation of the case was closed for a second time.

These files do not contain the Birmingham Field Office file on the investigation, nor do they contain any information on the re-investigation of the bombing that the FBI began in the mid-1990s.

For more information on the investigation, see:

- A Byte Out of History: The '63 Baptist Church Bombing
- Director's Speech at the Dedication of a New Birmingham Office

The investigative files in this matter have not yet been released under the FOIA.

This FOIA release consists of 11 sections, broken down into 51 smaller pdf files.