Volume 2, No. 1 (January, 1992) pp. 21-22

UNTIL JUSTICE ROLLS DOWN by Frank Sikora. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1991. Pp.175.

Reviewed by Deborah Barrow (Auburn University)

UNTIL JUSTICE ROLLS DOWN is a fascinating account of the story behind the fourteen year quest to find the Klansmen responsible for the tragic bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 that took the lives of four young black girls. Frank Sikora, undoubtedly aided by his long term experience as a journalist with the Birmingham NEWS, uses a descriptive approach reminiscent of Richard Kluger's SIMPLE JUSTICE to portray with great success the intensity of the war against desegregation that rocked Birmingham in 1963. More important, Sikora uses this technique like a good artist, building with each line a graphic portrait of the racial hatred that forms a vivid social- psychological profile of the members of the Klan and their families.

Against the backdrop of explosive events such as George Wallace's stand in the school house door to prevent integration at the University of Alabama, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decisions calling for desegregation in the Birmingham schools and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s targeting Birmingham which he called the most segregated southern city for intensive protest, the Klan and other white supremacists engaged in a spree of violence that was perhaps the worst of the 1960s. On Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, five teenage girls were in the women's lounge located in the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church's tieing one another's sashes, washing their hands and freshening up before joining the congregation upstairs in their special role that day as ushers. Just minutes before they were expected upstairs, a bomb, containing as many as 15 sticks of dynamite that had been placed under exterior steps near the entrance to the basement, exploded killing all but one of the girls. The bomb had shattered a thirty-inch wall of brick and stone, mutilating the bodies of the young girls. Over the next five years the FBI launched "the most intense probe since the search for gangland figure John Dillinger in the 1930's" (p.20). Despite the effort, no one was charged with the bombing and because the FBI's jurisdiction was triggered under a Reconstruction Act for civil rights violations, the FBI closed its investigation in 1968 when the statute of limitations became effective.

Sikora spends time in the first third of the book taking the reader through the tragedy itself, making real the families and their grief. For the remainder of the story he does an equally compelling job of bringing the reader to understand the people who ultimately would confront one another in a dramatic trial. The first of these personalities, and the one responsible for resuming the closed case and obtaining the requisite permission for the FBI files, was William J. Baxley. As the newly-elected Attorney General of Alabama in 1971 Baxley focused his attention immediately upon reopening the case. Baxley had made a pledge to himself in his last year of law school as he witnessed the depth of racial hatred around him and then heard the news of the bombing that he "was going to do something about it" (p.39).

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True to his vow, once in office he not only hired the first black attorney and the first black woman attorney to serve with the state attorney general's office as well as the first black assistant attorney general, Myron Thompson, who would later become a federal district judge, but he also made resolution of the 1963 bombing case a top priority. Indeed, the case became "the controlling force in Baxley's life" (p.40). Good intentions and efforts notwithstanding, the case languished unresolved for another six years. All of this would change when Baxley hired an attorney in 1976 named Bob Eddy. In January 1977, Eddy checked into the Holiday Inn in Birmingham and when he left ten months later he had -- through dogged persistence and a remarkable talent for sleuthing, bolstered by a persuasive yet unassuming style -- successfully unraveled the mystery surrounding the incident. In the course of the year Eddy entered into the bizarre and clandestine world of the Ku Klux Klan. The odyssey brought him face to face with the individuals whose pathos were the essence of the hatred preached by the organization as well as victims who lived closely to it either from ignorance or fear.

Eventually, Baxley and Eddy, with the help of a courageous witness, were able to obtain the conviction of seventy-three year old Robert Chambliss, marking the first racially-motivated murder conviction in a southern state. In the process of putting together the Chambliss case, Baxley's office also obtained enough evidence against avowed white supremacist J.B. Stoner to convict him as well. Although Eddy knew that others were involved, after 14 years Chambliss was the only one against whom a case could be made.

Sikora's book is not an analytical treatment of its subject, so one would not want to read it with that expectation. However, it is an exceptionally well-told account of a very significant episode in the history of the struggle for racial equality in the South. The book also does more than preserve a slice of history. It gives great insight into the mind set of white supremacists and the nature of the organizations that advance that cause. That in itself makes the book important because ironically, the bulk of Klan cases taken to federal court along with the success in dismantling these organizations has occurred since the time of the Chambliss trial.


Copyright 1992