Bending Toward Justice

December 15, 2018
A former U.S. attorney nominated by Bill Clinton chronicles his successful attempt to prosecute the last of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church bombers.Jones has led a rather remarkable career. His most recent accomplishment was a victory in a special election that made him Alabama's first Democratic Senator since 1992; he defeated Republican Roy Moore for Jeff Sessions' vacated Senate seat. Raised in the Jim Crow era of segregated Birmingham, the author was deeply influenced as a young college student by the model lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird. More importantly, in 1977, he watched Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley work a legal miracle by securing a murder conviction against "Dynamite" Bob Chambliss, the Klansman who had eluded justice 14 years earlier for the bombing that killed four African-American girls. In this lively first-person account, written with Truman, Jones (b. 1954) walks us through his early life as a middle-class white boy who grew up mostly unaware of racial tensions in the Birmingham suburbs--until 1963, when white supremacists launched a campaign of terror against the civil rights protesters, especially the young people's demonstrations at the 16th Street Baptist Church. The author was 9 when the horrendous bombing occurred. The subsequent FBI investigation went on for years and was thwarted at every turn, shut down in 1968 without any charges against the three prime suspects: Chambliss, Tommy Blanton, and Bobby Frank Cherry. As an up-and-coming federal prosecutor and defense attorney, Jones tied himself to the Democratic Party. Building on what he had witnessed Baxley achieve, he decided it was time to strike at Blanton when he was nominated U.S. Attorney in 1997. The bulk of this compelling account focuses on that extraordinary trial and 2001 conviction.A useful firsthand account of a series of civil rights landmarks, with some additional analysis of our current political climate.

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February 1, 2019

On September 15, 1963, prosegregation terrorists set fire to the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, killing four black girls--Addie May Collins, Carol Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley--and injuring 22 others. For years no perpetrators faced justice. Jones, elected in December 2017 as Alabama's first Democratic U.S. senator since 1992, chronicles how that changed. He credits a quest for justice that Alabama Attorney General William Baxley launched in the 1970s. Jones closed the quest in 2000-02 as U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, leading the prosecution of two remaining Ku Klux Klan bombers. Here, Jones presents a work that is part memoir, part history detailing his efforts to investigate and prosecute the perpetrators, while unfolding an account of how elected and appointed officials enforced Jim Crow laws in the 1960s and were complacent with white supremacy. VERDICT This poignant and powerful story tracks changes in Southern life since the 1960s, uncovering hard truths to correct America's moral compass with an understanding of the need for activism and political discourse to achieve social justice.--Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

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January 1, 2019
Alabama U.S. Senator Jones' recounting of the Birmingham church tragedy is less a history than an account of his own tortured journey toward racial awareness. We could happily do without self-absorbed reflections, such as how the murders provided provenance for a white nine-year-old's lifelong quest for justice and redemption. Yet Jones, with journalist Truman, manages a deeply affecting portrait of the devastation wrought by the 16th Street Church bombing and the enduring blight and bitterness it left in the black community. His decision to prosecute the Klansmen responsible, nearly 40 years later, was largely motivated by a desire to save Alabama from itself. Initially optimistic about the guilty verdicts of 2002, he ruefully acknowledges the renewed outbursts of racial hatred since 2016, noting that many of the good people of the South in the fifties and sixties ignored or were deceived by the resilience of their bigotry . . . . After all, an underlying idea behind segregation is to exclude that which you don't want to deal with. A decent account of a key moment in the antisegregation movement told primarily from the white perspective.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)