04/15/01
JEFF HANSEN
News staff writer

Most of the public knowledge of Thomas E. Blanton Jr. comes from FBI documents written during the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bomb investigation in 1963. The 25-year-old described in those files:

Hated "Negroes and Jews" and expressed "satisfaction and happi­ness" at the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. This came from a sworn statement by Waylene Vaughn in October 1963. She told FBI agents of dates with Blanton that summer: He had poured a highly irritating acid onto the seats of cars driven by blacks, so they would sit in the acid when they got in to drive.

• Wanted to see all Catholic churches blown up. This came from a sworn statement by Wymon Lee in October 1963. Lee, then a fellow Ku Klux Klan member with Blanton, has said Blanton's mother was Catholic and he turned against the church after her death.

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  Special Report: Sixteenth Street Church Bombing

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• Was a troublemaker and a smart aleck. This from then-Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry. Cherry, now 71, is charged with murder in the church bombing but his trial is being delayed for medical reasons.

  The Blanton of today - who at 62 faces a murder trial for the church bombing - doesn't seem as fierce.

  He walks slightly bent over and often slouches sideways in a chair. Age has added jowls to his face. In court he is unswayingly polite, including his interactions with a black sheriff's deputy and with black reporters.

  One thing links the Blanton of 1963 and the Blanton of today - he insists he is innocent of the bombing that killed four girls in 1963.

  Then, Blanton was 5 feet 10 and weighed 170 pounds. He drove a 1957 Chevy and worked as a stock clerk. He had gone through 10th grade at West End High but earned a general equivalency diploma in the Navy, when he was an airplane mechanic's helper.

  The old FBI files describe Blanton as an unskilled laborer.

  In 1960-61, he worked as a shipping clerk but was fired because he couldn't learn the job and lacked initiative, FBI files say. A truck driver in 1962, he often went to work in cowboy boots and hat, and loud, checkered shirts. He was fired because he would disappear from work for two or three days. Blanton said that since he was paid by the hour, what he did with his time was his business.

  Birmingham police investigative files from the early 1960s name Blanton as a member of the violent Eastview Ku Klux Klan Klavern 13 and say he was the friend of another bombing suspect, Robert Chambliss. Chambliss was convicted of murder in 1977 for the Sixteenth Street bombing and died in prison in 1985.

  Even after the church bombing, while under the close watch of FBI agents, Blanton continued to campaign against racial integration and civil rights. He and Cherry flew into a rage in 1965 when they saw a children's Bible that showed its characters as black, FBI files say.

  Blanton graduated from Birmingham School of Law in 1980, and in 1993 he began an effort to get the FBI to release all of its files on him.

  The notoriety of the murder indictment cost Blanton his job last year. The Hoover Wal-Mart, his employer, said it was not passing judgment on Blanton. A company spokesman said Blanton was suspended while his case runs its course.

  © The Birmingham News