BACK TO "BOMBINGHAM"

By ADAM COHEN

Sept. 15, 1963, was Youth Day at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Four African-American girls in white dresses and shoes had left Bible class early and were about to go upstairs to help run the adult service. But before they got there, a timed-explosive device planted under the church steps ripped massive holes in the side of the building, sending stone, glass and metal flying in every direction. Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins and Carol Robertson--ages 11 to 14--died in the blast. Even during the bloodiest days of racial conflict in the South, even in a city so beset by explosives that it was nicknamed Bombingham, this was a uniquely shocking crime. Recalls Representative John Lewis of Georgia, a civil rights veteran who was in Alabama at the time: "It was one of the darkest hours of the civil rights movement."

Federal and local investigators may be about to shed some new light on that grim day. The FBI and Birmingham police announced last week they had reopened their investigation into the bombing after obtaining unspecified "new information." A single former Ku Klux Klansman, Robert Chambliss, was convicted in the case in 1977, but there has long been evidence suggesting he had at least three accomplices. Investigators received their new leads about a year ago, and have been pursuing them for months, but they decided to make the investigation public when they began conducting interviews of witnesses. The FBI is not talking about the nature of the new information, or the likelihood it will lead to new arrests. "You have a 33-year-old case, and we don't want to raise expectations too high," says Craig Dahle, a spokesman for the FBI's Birmingham office. But, he adds, "we would not have reopened the case if we did not believe there was a basis for it, and a possibility of solving it."

The announcement came a day after the release of Four Little Girls, a Spike Lee documentary that is generating renewed interest in the crime. Investigators say the timing is coincidental. The bombing holds a special place in civil rights history not only because of its brutality and the youth of its victims, but also because it so bitterly dashed the hopes for nonviolent progress that had been raised only weeks before, when Martin Luther King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington. Lewis says it is important that investigators continue to pursue the case until it yields up the murderers. "If they are brought to justice," he says, "just maybe we won't go down this road again."

--By Adam Cohen