Cherry found guilty of 1963 church bombing
A jury yesterday found Bobby Frank Cherry guilty of murdering four girls by bombing Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in 1963. After the verdict was read, Cherry turned, called a prosecutor a punk, and said, "This whole bunch lied all the way through this thing. I told the truth. I don't know why I'm going to jail for nothing." At Sixteenth Street Baptist, meanwhile, the congregation danced in the aisles. "Birmingham of yesterday is no more," the Rev. Fred D. Shuttlesworth said at the service. "Backwards never. Forwards ever." The Birmingham News shares the sentiment. "Justice has been too long delayed and too long denied; now justice, finally, is done," the paper editorialized today. But it added a caution to putting too much behind us. "While this case is over, the church bombing and the racial hatred that led to it must never be forgotten. Nor should we forget the cost, in lost and damaged lives and to this city's image, of that hatred," the paper said. "While the case may have ended, the grief of the four little girls' families and friends never will. May this verdict somehow ease that pain. Our thoughts and prayers go out to them."

One of those family members, Eunice Davis (sister of 14-year-old victim Cynthia Wesley), told the Los Angeles Times, "Cynthia is not in my life and that's what hurts. There will never be closure on this for me, but I trusted the jury to do justice. It wouldn't have mattered if they were black or white." She also told The Washington Post, "My mother used to always tell me you've got to learn to love and to forget, and the hardest part is going to be to forget."

Diane McWhorter, whose book on Birmingham won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for general ...