Thomas Blanton, Who Bombed a Birmingham Church, Dies at 82

Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. was born on June 20, 1938, in Washington. News accounts said his father, known as Pops, was a notorious racist in Birmingham.

The younger Mr. Blanton had a 10th-grade education and served as an aircraft mechanic in the Navy from 1956 to 1959, according to F.B.I. files. When he was arrested in 2000, he was living in a trailer with no running water and working at a Walmart.

An F.B.I. report that became public in 1980 said that Mr. Hoover, who died in 1972, had blocked efforts to charge the four suspects shortly after the crime, although three people told F.B.I. agents that they had seen the four near the church about eight hours before the explosion. Mr. Hoover was said to have blocked the case because he thought a successful prosecution was unlikely. But the jury that convicted Mr. Chambliss in 1977 heard less direct evidence than was available to Mr. Hoover in 1964.

In 1997, a group of black ministers urged Doug Jones, then the United States attorney in Birmingham, to open a new investigation into the remaining suspects.

“Tom Blanton saw change and didn’t like it,” Mr. Jones, now a United States senator from Alabama, said at the trial. Mr. Blanton maintained his innocence.

Evidence presented at the trial included incriminating tape recordings made by the F.B.I. that implicated both Mr. Blanton and Mr. Cherry.

After Mr. Blanton’s conviction in 2001, Bill Baxley, who had prosecuted Mr. Chambliss as Alabama’s attorney general in 1977, wrote an angry opinion article in The New York Times asserting that the F.B.I. had not been forthcoming in the Chambliss case and had not revealed the existence of the tapes.