The Congressional Gold Medals for Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley come 50 years after the black girls were killed by a Ku Klux Klan bomb.
Just as the federal recognition is long in coming, so was justice.
The plot to bomb 16th Street Baptist Church can be traced to a once-remote spot along Alabama's scenic Cahaba River. Suburban traffic now rumbles above a deserted, gravelly spot under the Cahaba River Bridge.
"But in the day it was apparently a hot spot for some of the more violent members of the Klan to sit down here and talk and do their dirty work," says former U.S. attorney Doug Jones.
Jones was the federal prosecutor who tried and convicted klansmen Thomas Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry in 2001 and 2002, for the murder of the four black girls killed in one of the most notorious racially-motivated crimes in U.S. history.
Blanton and Cherry were part of a small group of disgruntled white supremacists who didn't think the Klan was doing enough to stop the rising tide of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963.
"They just were the self-proclaimed Cahaba River Bridge Boys," he says. "It was almost like they were trying to be the outlaws of the Old West."
