Jefferson County Courthouse

Birmingham, Alabama

Alabama Attorney General William Baxley won the first conviction in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing here 14 years after the infamous crime at the landmark Birmingham church. The attack during the height of the civil rights movement killed four girls, shocked the nation and helped ensure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Baxley, then 28, took office in 1970 and made the unsolved murders of Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair his top priroity. He secured an indictment against Ku Klux Klan member Robert Chambliss, who was convicted of murder by a jury in 1977. Two fellow Klansmen, Thomas Blanton, and Bobby Frank Cherry, were prosecuted by U.S. District Attorney Doug Jones in the same courthouse in 2001 and 2002. Both were found guilty.