3400 pages
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.