Justice long delayed.

Byline: The Register-Guard

For the congregation of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., the trial of former Ku Klux Klansman Bobby Frank Cherry for the 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls will produce little in the way of healing. There is much truth to the old saying that justice delayed is justice denied.

Nearly four decades have passed since Sept. 15, 1963, when 10 sticks of dynamite exploded at the church, a rallying site for school desegregation. It was just before 10:30 a.m., and 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley had just finished Sunday school and were putting on choir robes in the basement.

In a blinding instant, the girls became martyrs whose deaths at the hands of depraved bigots would transform a regional struggle for equal rights into a national movement. At their funeral, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called them "modern heroines of a holy crusade."

So they were.

But they were also little girls who deserved the right to live and grow - and perhaps to have children of their own whom they might some day watch perform in the children's choir at church.

The longstanding failure of authorities to pursue the bombing case represents a shameful failure of the justice system. Until two years ago, only one of the four men suspected of planting the bomb, Robert "Dynamite Bob" Chambliss, was tried and convicted of murder. Another suspect, Herman Cash, died in 1994 without ever having been charged.

It was not until two years ago that prosecutors charged the two remaining suspects, Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry. Last May, a Birmingham jury convicted Blanton, but a judge deemed Cherry unfit, saying the suspect had suffered severe memory loss. The ruling seemed questionable, given that Cherry had given extensive, coherent interviews to investigators, lawyers and reporters in recent years. Late last week, the judge reversed his ruling. Now Cherry will be tried at age 72 for a crime committed when he was 31.

The delay wasn't due to a lack of evidence - prosecutors had informants and damning wiretaps soon after the bombing. But the investigation was squelched by Alabama Gov. George Wallace and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, both of whom despised the civil rights movement.

It took a tenacious effort by Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney who has served as chief prosecutor in the case, to bring Cherry to trial. Now Cherry will join a growing list of suspects who have been brought to justice for civil rights violence of past decades.

One of Martin Luther King's favorite Bible verses came from the book of Amos: "Let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream."

In the case of the Birmingham church bombing, judgment and righteousness long ago slowed to a trickle. But at least they're still flowing.