Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing that Changed the Course of Civil Rights

by Doug Jones

Overview

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 as a canonical civil rights history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250201447
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	210,004
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Doug Jones is a US Senator who has made finding common ground a hallmark of his tenure. In 2017, he became the first Democrat to win a Senate election in Alabama since 1992. As U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 1997 to 2001, Jones prosecuted two former Ku Klux Klan members for their roles in the racially-motivated 1963 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing that took the lives of four girls. He also secured an indictment against Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph.

Table of Contents

Foreword Rick Bragg ix

Author's Note xv

Part 1

Introduction: The Arc of History 3

1 The Bombing 16

2 Baxley 39

3 Langford 69

Part 2

4 The Job 95

5 Rudolph 111

6 Grand Juries 121

7 Sucker Punched 146

8 Blanton 175

9 Politics and Dementia 216

Part 3

10 Cherry 229

11 Epiphanies 282

12 Honoring the Children 292

13 One More Chance 302

14 Connecting the Dots 314

Acknowledgments 352

Index 355

Editorial Reviews

Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing That Changed the Course of Civil Rights is a valuable addition to the historical record of Alabama's role as the battleground state of the civil rights revolution…Jones's account provides an opportunity to revisit both the remarkable dark-horse campaign that made him the first Democratic senator from the South's reddest state in nearly three decades, as well as this tormenting saga of justice long delayed by Justice Department ineptitude and the personal malfeasance of the longtime F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover.

The New York Times Book Review - Howell Raines

For 40 years, justice had gone undone in the brutal murder of four young girls in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Forty years of pain and hurt for the families of those young girls and their community. Forty years of the Klan laughing at justice, getting away with the act of a coward. Doug Jones said no more. Justice had to be done. Those young girls deserved it. Their families deserved it. The community needed it. It took courage, commitment, and persistence. And—maybe most of all—heart.” —former vice president Joe Biden

“This book describes the painful sacrifice that was required, and may be called for again, for us to move toward true democracy in America. Facing the truth of our dark past with honesty and humility is the only way this nation can heal these deep wounds. But knowing the truth Jones shares in this book can set this nation free to earnestly build a more perfect union.” —Rep. John Lewis

“Doug Jones has proven himself adept at getting right with history against tall odds, whether it’s in his prosecution of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case or his election to the U. S. Senate. Bending Toward Justice is his riveting inside account of arguably the most important cold case prosecution in civil rights history, and a crucial contribution to our understanding of where we are—and he is—today.” —Diane McWhorter, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama—The Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution

“Lively...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.” —Kirkus Review

"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." —Booklist Review

“This book ought to be studied by national Democrats looking to rescue populist idealism from its Trumpian captivity.” —Howell Raines, New York Times Book Review

"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, Library Journal Review

From the Publisher

2018-11-21

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.

Kirkus Reviews

02/01/2019

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

Library Journal