Free America's Secret Jihad: The Hidden History of Religious Terrorism in the United States by Stuart Wexler Page B

children—unoffending, innocent, and beautiful—were the victims of one of the most vicious and tragic crimes ever perpetrated against humanity.
    And yet they died nobly. They are the martyred heroines of a holy crusade for freedom and human dignity. . . . They say to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered them,but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murderers. . . .
    The innocent blood of these little girls may well serve as a redemptive force that will bring new light to this dark city. . . . Indeed this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience. . . .
    And so I stand here to say this afternoon to all assembled here, that in spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not despair. . . . We must not become bitter nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence. No, we must not lose faith in our white brothers. Somehow we must believe that the most misguided among them can learn to respect the dignity and the worth of all human personality. 4
    The riots that initially plagued Birmingham following the bombing could have metastasized into total chaos but for the appeals of level-headed leaders like King, who reminded residents of the city of the power of nonviolence and compassion. These leaders were channeling the spirit of the Sunday school lesson that was never delivered that tragic Sunday morning, designed by a minister with the last name of Cross, about a “A Love That Forgives.”
    For some, the bombing also validated the sentiment, frequently cited by King, that the long “arc of the universe” ultimately “bends toward justice.” It took forty years, but three of the individuals responsible for the bombing went to prison for the crime. It required intense media pressure and dogged Alabama prosecutors to pry incriminating records from a reluctant FBI, but the system ultimately worked.
    Such a sentiment, while reassuring, is misplaced. Records suggest that the FBI is still concealing potentially important evidence in the case. For reasons that are still unclear, the FBI may well have protected the mastermind of the attack, a man deeply steeped in Christian Identity theology until the day he died: Jesse Benjamin Stoner. Such obstruction, however, as much sense as it made in 1963, can no longer be justified.
    The FBI routinely withheld material from local prosecutors in the 1960s, believing that they would compromise Bureau sources and methods for the sake of a state trial that was likely to be sabotaged by a racist police officer, a bigoted juror, or a segregationistjudge. The conventional understanding of the FBI’s obstruction in the BAPBOMB case (the FBI’s code name for the bombing) says that, as his men failed to develop a federal case, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover decided that it would be best to maintain these sources—including violent Alabama racists who were turned into informants during the course of the investigation—for other purposes, rather than waste them on a doomed state prosecution. As it turned out, even after the prosecution of one bomber, Robert Chambliss, fifteen years after the fact, the FBI continued to withhold vital informant and wiretap information from Alabama prosecutors. Only in the 1990s was this evidence released, resulting in the convictions, in 2001, of Tommy Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry. Again, the FBI claimed that it was simply protecting living sources. 5
    But additional, new information raises a different and more alarming possibility, one that is rare but unfortunately familiar in FBI crime fighting. This new information, developed by historian Gary May, suggests that an FBI informant inside the Alabama KKK, Gary Rowe, a man whose service as a source predated the Sixteenth Street church attack, may have been involved in the actual bombing. Although this obviously would have occurred without the approval of the FBI, it would have placed the