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This Day in Black History: May 15, 2002

Bobby Frank Cherry, the last of the Birmingham church bomb killers to be convicted of murder, was sentenced in 2002.

It took more than a decade to prosecute and convict the three Ku Klux Klan members who bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama. On May 15, 2002, Bobby Frank Cherry was the last of the killers to be convicted.
He was found guilty on four counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison.
Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Denise McNair were killed in the Birmingham, Alabama, church bombings, one of the most horrific moments of the civil rights movement, in September 1963.

During his early years, Cherry joined the Marines where he became a demolition expert. Before the church bombings, he became a member of the Ku Klux Klan and was part of a mob that attacked a Black minister

He died of cancer at the age of 74 in the Kilby Correctional Facility on Nov. 18, 2004. 

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(Photo: AL.COM /Landov)

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