In One Last Trial, Alabama Faces Old Wound
How many?

How many men were involved in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church on Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963? How many men, linked to a violent klavern of the Ku Klux Klan in a city that routinely shook with bombs, knew about the plan to plant the dynamite that blew through the church basement and killed four girls?

When it was over, when word spread of the murders of Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, how many of those men slapped the bombers on the back, bought them a beer or barbecue, and formed a circle of silence that protected them, for years and years?

"You live through it, and, if you can, you live above it," said Alpha Robertson, Carole Robertson's mother. "You can't waste a life hating people because all they do is live their life, laughing, doing more evil."

So you wait, said the 83-year-old Mrs. Robertson, as decades pass, as first one suspect, then a second, is found guilty, as a third suspect dies untried.

Finally, there comes the trial of Bobby Frank Cherry, now 71, the last of the primary suspects in the bomb blast that killed her teenage daughter and the three other girls, in the most shameful incident of the civil rights struggle.
In http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/12/national/12ALAB.html?todaysheadlines=&pagewanted=all&position=top