Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing that Changed the Course of Civil Rights Audiobook
Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing that Changed the Course of Civil Rights Audiobook
- Rick Bragg, Doug Jones
- Macmillan Audio
- 2019-03-05
- 15 h 5 min
Summary:
“For 40 years, justice had opted undone in the brutal murder of four young girls in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Chapel…Doug Jones said no more. Justice had to be completed. Those girls deserved it. Their own families deserved it. The community needed it. It took courage, dedication, and persistence. And-maybe most of all-heart.” – Former Vice Leader Joe Biden
The program is read by the author.
The story from the decades-long fight to bring justice to the victims from the 16th Street Baptist about Twisting Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing that Changed the Course of Civil Rights Church bombing, culminating in Sen. Doug Jones’ prosecution from the last living bombers.
On Sept 15, 1963, the 16th Road Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama was bombed. The blast killed four girls and wounded twenty-two others. The FBI suspected four particularly radical Ku Klux Klan members. Yet because of reluctant witnesses, too little physical evidence, and pervasive racial prejudice the situation was closed without the indictments.
But simply because Martin Luther King, Jr. famously portrayed it, ‘the arc of the moral world is long, nonetheless it bends toward justice.’ Years later, Alabama Lawyer General William Baxley reopened the case, ultimately convicting one of the bombers in 1977. Another suspect passed on in 1994, and US Lawyer Doug Jones attempted and convicted the final two in 2001 and 2002, representing the modification of an outrageous miscarriage of justice nearly forty years in the making. Jones himself went on to earn election as Alabama’s first Democratic Senator since 1992 in a dramatic competition against Republican challenger Roy Moore.
Bending Toward Justice is a dramatic and compelling accounts of a key moment in our long national struggle for equality, relayed by an author who played a significant role in these occasions. A distinguished function of legal and personal history, this audiobook can be destined to consider its place alongside additional canonical civil rights histories.