10,494 Days Later, Two Arrests

To some, the deaths of Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins remain a tragedy equal in its scope to the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

And for almost four decades, many Americans have asked: How could anyone protect the people who did this? How could people shield the racists who bombed an Alabama church?

The answer, a long time coming, is that they couldn't - at least not forever.

"Hallelujah — it's been a long time coming and it's long overdue," former Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley toldCBS News Thursday morning, adding in no uncertain terms he thinks the two suspects arrested Wednesday were involved.

More than 10,000 days have now elapsed between the carnage at Birmingham's Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and Wednesday's, when two former Klansmen were arrested in connection with the bombing. Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Cherry have been charged with murder. They are being held without bail and face life in prison.

Cherry's lawyer told theCBS NewsEarly Show Thursday morning that his client will plead innocent.

One other man already has been convicted, under Baxley's prosecution, for the 1963 bombing: Robert Edward Chambliss was convicted in 1977. He died in prison eight years later. A fourth suspect, who is dead, was never tried.

"It's not that more evidence has been discovered, or that there is more prosecutorial motivation that there was 30, 35 years ago," says David J. Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book,Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference."Family members are no longer willing to cover for people...I think it is the moral, ethical burden of living with that guilt and guilty conscience."

The arrests of Blanton and Cherry are just the latest example of a South slowly letting go its age-old resistance to change on the issues of racism, segratation, and civil rights.

"I think it is happening all across the South...You have people saying, 'I'm not going to my grave with this on my conscience,'" says Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a leader of the civil rights movement.

"There have been a number of important civil rights era cases, but the fact is this really might be the most important of all," says Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Over the past year, estranged relatives of Cherry have said publicly that he talked of helping plant the dynamite. His son, Thomas Frank Cherry, appeared before a grand jury on Tuesday.

The years in which these witnesses failed to come forward could hurt the case memories fade, evidence is harder to marshal. But in some ways, the time elapsed might help the prosecution.

"It is almost inconceivable that this could have been brought in a state court successfully" in 1963, Potok says. Juries in civil rights cases often acquitted in minutes, and"any witnesses who testified against a Klansman in the 1960s were taking their lives in their hands."

But Alabama has changed, he says, and Blanton and Cherry will be tried under today's rules, not yesterday's.

There are many other murders, bombings, and acts of terror from the civil rights era that never whose perpetrators were never brought to justice. But with the latest arrests in connection with the Birmingham bombing, those who have watched over decades say this case is one of the biggest ones of all.

"Very likely, there will be other cases," Potok says. But none like the Birmingham bombing case."There will be no cases of this magnitude."