The
story of the decades-long fight to bring justice to the victims of the
16th Street Baptist Church bombing, culminating in Sen. Doug Jones'
prosecution of the last living bombers.
On September 15, 1963, the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham,
Alabama was bombed. The blast killed four young girls and injured
twenty-two others. The FBI suspected four particularly radical Ku Klux
Klan members. Yet due to reluctant witnesses, a lack of physical
evidence, and pervasive racial prejudice the case was closed without any
indictments.
But as Martin Luther King, Jr. famously expressed it, "the arc of the
moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." Years later,
Alabama Attorney General William Baxley reopened the case, ultimately
convicting one of the bombers in 1977. Another suspect passed away in
1994, and US Attorney Doug Jones tried and convicted the final two in
2001 and 2002, representing the correction of an outrageous miscarriage
of justice nearly forty years in the making. Jones himself went on to
win election as Alabama's first Democratic Senator since 1992 in a
dramatic race against Republican challenger Roy Moore.
Bending Toward Justice
is a dramatic and compulsively readable account of a key moment in our
long national struggle for equality, related by an author who played a
major role in these events. A distinguished work of legal and personal
history, the book is destined to take its place alongside other
canonical civil rights histories like Parting the Waters and Mississippi Burning.
