BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) A jury pool three times larger than normal was summoned yesterday for the trial of a former Ku Klux Klansman accused in one of the most notorious crimes of the civil rights era: a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls.

Thomas Blanton Jr., who is now 62, entered the courthouse without comment.

"He"s nervous ... scared, as any human being would be under the scrutiny he"s received," defense attorney John Robbins said. If convicted, Blanton could get life in prison. About 100 prospective jurors were called. Jury selection is expected to extend into next week.

Circuit Judge James Garrett told the prospective jurors that the jury will be sequestered for the trial, which is expected to last at least two weeks, and that the jurors will be anonymous, identified in court only by number.

The explosion at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church on Sept. 15, 1963, killed Denise McNair, 11, and three 14-year-olds: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson. The bombing galvanized the civil rights movement.

Blanton is one of four men suspected of planting the dynamite. Only one Robert Chambliss has been tried. He was convicted of murder in 1977 and died in prison.

Another suspect, Herman Cash, died in 1994 without being charged. And last week, the judge indefinitely postponed the trial of Bobby Frank Cherry for tests on whether the 71-year-old is mentally competent.

In a statement, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church congregation said the trial would not produce healing and suggested the case would have gone to court long ago had four white girls been killed.

"While a 38-year delay is not a real source of elation or encouragement, we do believe that it is never too late to do what is right," the congregation said.

At the time of bombing, blacks were integrating Birmingham"s all-white schools and the church was a gathering site for protest marches.

The FBI concluded within two years that the bombing was the work of the four men, but closed the case in 1968 without filing charges.

The case was reopened by state prosecutors in the 1970s, resulting in Chambliss" conviction. Blanton and Cherry were indicted last May after black ministers asked the FBI to take another look.

In recent years, other civil rights-era murder cases have also been revived. In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of assassinating civil rights leader Medgar Evers in Mississippi in 1963.

In 1998, former Klan imperial wizard Sam Bowers was convicted in the 1966 firebomb-killing of an NAACP leader in Hattiesburg, Miss. In 1999, three men were convicted in Mississippi of the 1970 killing of a black sharecropper.