Civil Rights Survivors Meet, Remember
By JAY REEVES
Associated Press Writer

12:46 AM PST, February 14, 2004

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Four decades and a half-dozen trials haven't erased the raw feelings that still surround the civil rights murders of the segregated South.

Through tears and voices choked with emotion, victims' relatives, police and prosecutors recalled those hard times Friday in the first gathering of both relatives who lost loved ones to several infamous murders and the people who helped bring the killers to justice.

By sharing vivid stories of seven slayings in Alabama and Mississippi and the decades of work that it took to get the guilty behind bars, participants helped salve years of hurt and frustration.

"We still are learning things. We are still in therapy of sorts," said Chris McNair, whose daughter Denise was among four black girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963.

It was only in the last three years that the last two remaining suspects, ex-Ku Klux Klansmen Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, were sent to prison for the bombing, the deadliest act of the civil rights era.

Weeping, Junie Collins Peavy told of identifying the body of her sister Addie Mae after she died in the church blast and the two decades of internal turmoil that followed as killers walked free.

"People used to look at me and shake their heads like there wasn't any hope," Peavy said. "But I always felt there was hope."

The meeting, a symposium billed as "The Gathering: Civil Rights Justice Remembered," was organized mainly by Doug Jones, a former federal prosecutor who sent Blanton and Cherry to prison.

Besides the church bombing, the conference focused on three other civil rights murders that finally ended in guilty verdicts despite years of delays.

It was only a year ago that Ernest Avants went to prison for murdering Ben Chester White in 1966 near Natchez, Miss. FBI Special Agent Kevin Rust recounted how Avants was murdered by Klansmen in an apparent attempt to lure Martin Luther King Jr. to Mississippi for assassination.

"The only thing he had done to deserve it was the color of his skin," said Rust.

The widow of Vernon Dahmer, who angered the Klan by helping blacks register to vote in Mississippi, recalled the night their home was shot up and firebombed, fatally injuring her husband on Jan. 10, 1966. Fearful of an attack, the family had been taking turns sleeping until only days before.

"In December of '65 we stopped getting threats, so we stopped sleeping in shifts," said Ellie Dahmer. "But we stopped a little too soon."

While the gathering at Birmingham-Southern College marked the first time for an event of its kind, many of the victims' families met years before. Vernon Dahmer Jr. said McNair, who is a photographer in Birmingham, came to Mississippi to take pictures at his father's funeral.

Klan leader Sam Bowers was convicted in 1998 of ordering Dahmer's death.

Retired FBI agent Neil Shanahan, who helped investigate the church bombing, said officers often knew quickly from informants and other sources that Klan members were behind civil rights killings.

"There wasn't a big mystery about who had done this collectively," he said. "The problem was sorting out from these organizations (the individuals) who did it. ... It takes time."

Another retired agent, Robert Murphy, got choked up remembering how he was forced to leave Birmingham with his family after Blanton allegedly threatened to kill him amid the investigation. There was still work to be done, said Murphy.

"I did want to finish the Baptist church case," he said.