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The Alabama Parole Board might be granting parole to an old Ku
Klux Klansman, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., who was imprisoned in
2001 because of the killing of four young black ladies in 1963,
after making a bomb explode near of a church.

The parole hearings are scheduled by the Alabama Parole Board to
begin next Wednesday in Montgomery. This announcement has caused
a serious opposition in the population given the current
situation the country is living in after the recent, and
apparently no justified, homicides of black men by police
officers, which have generated protests over racial
discrimination in several parts of the United States.

According to the president of the Alabama’s National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Bernard Simelton,
releasing Blanton will send a horrible message to the population.

“It would be a slap in the face to those young ladies and their
families to release him,” said Simelton
What happened in 1963?

Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. is currently a 78-year-old Ku Klux
Klansman, known for hating black people. He was sentenced to
life incarceration in 2001, 38 years after he was responsible
for committing hate killings in the racial disaggregated Alabama
during the civil right movement.

On 15 September 1963, a bomb went off at the 16th Street Baptist
Church in Birmingham (Alabama) causing the dead of four black
girls who were preparing the church for the Sunday morning mass.
The victims were Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14),
Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris, also known as Cynthia
Wesley. As well, Collins’ sister, Sarah Collins Rudolph, was
severely injured by the bomb blast, losing an eye. According to
Harvey Henley (79), a neighbor of Birmingham community, the day
of the explosion he was home, located few block away from the
church, and he said it was the loudest thing he’s ever heard.

“He should never set foot outside of that jail cell again,”
said Henley regarding the attempt to grant parole to Blanton.
Three Klansmen were convicted by the explosion including
Blanton, Robert Chambliss, known as “Dynamite Bob,” was found
guilty in 1977 and Bobby Frank Cherry was indicted in 2000 just
like Blanton, after FBI reopened the case, implicating Cherry
and Blanton due to secret recordings made at the criminals’
houses.

However, “dynamite bomb” and Cherry died behind the bars.
Therefore Blanton is the only one left alive out of the three
KKK members imprisoned by the deadly explosion of 1963.

Opposition to the parole
After 15 years of incarceration, the three-person Alabama Parole
Board is considering granting parole to Blanton given he is now
an elderly man.

Though inmates are not allowed to attend to such hearings,
Blanton’s release opponents will certainly be attending to
Montgomery next Wednesday. There are expected to participate
several relatives from the murdered girls, including Sarah
Collin Rudolph, and the current pastor of the Baptist church.

Doug Jones, a former US attorney, who prosecuted Blanton years
ago, said Blanton’s actions were terrorism even before the word
became a part of the daily day communication. Jones also
believes that the inmate’s advanced age should not be the reason
or the determinant factor considered to grant parole.

“It took (38) years for him to be brought to justice, to begin
with,” Jones said. “I think that mitigates against the fact that
he is an elderly man now.”
Freeing Blanton through the parole was granting, implies an
extraordinary amount of things, such as overruling a preceding
life incarceration sentence, freeing a man who committed a hate
crime to innocent girls, who was part of a subversive and
extremist group that believed in white supremacy and pledged for
the purification of the American population. But beyond that, it
is important to analyze the context under which the parole
hearings are being made, in a nostalgic South that suffered the
racial discrimination along the civil rights movement and where
the named movement was primarily promoted from.

But as well, it is important to consider the response in
America, few weeks after the lethal and brutal police attacks on
black men in several states, and the protest against racial
discrimination. Though it is not the purpose of the Blanton’s
parole consideration, it might give the message that black
people are being treated distinctly, and it might be perceived
as if their deaths are not so important in the legal system.

“It is our further position that it would be a travesty of
justice,” he said. Hezekiah Jackson, president of the Birmingham
chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP).

http://www.pulseheadlines.com/kkk-member-found-guilty-back-in- 1963-up-for-parole/44496/
 

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