Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 15: Justice delayed, but not entirely denied, in white supremacist terrorist cases

This is an informative discussion from earlier this week on "Confronting Domestic Terrorism" from Jerry Mitchell's Mississippi Center for Investigative Reporting (MCIR). The event was co-sponsored by Millsaps College, my undergraduate alma mater in Jackson MS.

"Confronting Domestic Terrorism" featuring Doug Jones, Lisa McNair, Andy Sheldon, and Bill Baxley 04/14/2021:

Most of the panelists speak with beautiful Southern accents, BTW.

One of the points stressed in the discussion toward the end is how important investigative journalism is and how little emphasis it receives from corporate media these days.

Interestingly enough, near the end Doug Jones and Jerry Mitchell get on to the relevance of how important the campaign financing issue is in determining whether prosecutors and investigators can do an adequate job in investigating crimes and corruption. Money in politics is messing up everything.

The ongoing investigative work of the MCIR can be found at their website, https://www.mississippicir.org

Their lead story at this writing is by Jerry Mitchell, George Floyd wasn’t the only one to die after an officer kneeled on him. So did Mississippi’s Robert Loggins. 04/14/2021.

The 1963 Birmingham church bombing is a main topic in this discussion. Here is a contemporary UPI report by William Handel on the event, Grief, rage hang over church blast scene 09/15/1963:

At the rear of the church basement there was an ugly hole which hours before was a door. Two cars sitting just outside the church were shattered wrecks. One had a door caved into the backseat from a chunk of stone, and holes big as footballs pierced it.

Other debris was hurled across the street, and amid the watermelon-sized stones was a twisted handrail for what once were steps. About 10 other cars with windows, hoods and roofs smashed were crazily parked where the blast had blown them.

They brought out the first shrouded body of a little girl and the crowd went wild.

"Let me look, I think it's my sister," said one Negro. They let him look.

"This is my sister, and she's dead," he said. The head was severed from the body. The young man was led to the same ambulance.

The current Britannica Online entry on the event Chelsey Parrott-Sheffer talks about the long-delayed justice in the courts:

Violence broke out across the city in the aftermath of the bombing. Two more young African Americans died, and the National Guard was called in to restore order. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke at the funeral of three of the girls. Despite repeated demands that the perpetrators be brought to justice, the first trial in the case was not held until 1977, when former clan member Robert E. Chambliss was convicted of murder (Chambliss, who continued to maintain his innocence, died in prison in 1985). The case was reopened in 1980, in 1988, and finally again in 1997, when two other former clan members—Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry—were brought to trial. Blanton was convicted in 2001 and Cherry in 2002; both received life sentences (Cherry died in 2004, Blanton in 2020). A fourth suspect, Herman Frank Cash, died in 1994 before he could be tried.