The 1989 Bombing Attacks on Civil Rights Legal Offices form the violent backdrop to the threats later made against Bryan Stevenson’s office: a civil-rights lawyer and a federal appeals court judge had been killed by bombs, and further bombs were sent to legal offices and a courthouse. The account presents the sequence as an apparent campaign against legal professionals connected to civil rights, making the danger facing such work more than an abstract warning.

The attacks

Two years before the office threats described in the narrative, civil-rights lawyer Robert “Robbie” Robinson was murdered when a bomb sent to his law office in Savannah, Georgia, exploded. Around the same time, federal appeals court judge Robert Vance was killed by a mail bomb in Birmingham, Alabama. Days later, a third bomb was sent to a civil-rights office in Florida, followed by a fourth addressed to a courthouse in Atlanta. The account does not identify who sent the bombs or establish the outcome of the later two incidents; it emphasizes the sequence and its targets.

A perceived campaign against civil-rights work

The attacks on Robinson and Vance, followed by bombs sent to a civil-rights office and a courthouse, prompted the perception that the bomber was targeting legal professionals connected to civil rights. That apparent pattern linked violence against an individual lawyer with threats to the institutions and offices where legal challenges were pursued. The threat was not described as confined to one place or one kind of target: the sequence reached a lawyer’s office, a judge, another civil-rights office, and a courthouse.

The warning’s effect on the Equal Justice Initiative

The remembered attacks shaped how the Equal Justice Initiative responded when its own office received its third bomb threat in two months. Staff and law students were nervous, and the earlier killings made it difficult to dismiss a threat as a hoax. For weeks, staff carried mail packages to the federal courthouse for X-ray screening before opening them. In the immediate incident, the caller had described the office building precisely, intensifying concern as everyone left the building and waited for police. The earlier bombings thus recur in the narrative not only as past violence, but as a practical warning that altered how the organization handled its mail and assessed its safety.