How Doug Jones prosecuted two Klansmen for killing 4 black girls [View all]

[Wwcd]

About Doug Jones.
https://still4hill.com/2017/11/11/our-most-vulnerable-members/

Let’s take a look at the Democrat running against Roy Moore.

1963 Birmingham church bombing:
How Doug Jones prosecuted two Klansmen for killing 4 black girls

https://img.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=


From left, Denise McNair, 11; Carole Robertson, 14; Addie Mae Collins, 14, and Cynthia Dianne Wesley, 14, were killed Sept. 15, 1963, when a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala. (AP)
The case haunted Birmingham for years.

Four black girls in Alabama had been killed in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church — a crime that shocked the country and helped fuel the civil rights movement.

Yet the men responsible — members of the Ku Klux Klan who’d boasted about their role — were never tried and convicted. That changed in 1977 when Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss, the suspected ringleader of the bombing, was put on trial.

At the time, Doug Jones, now a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in a hotly contested race Alabama, was a second-year law student. He skipped classes to sit in on the trial, watching in amazement as William Joseph Baxley II, then U.S. attorney in Alabama, presented evidence against Chambliss.

Baxley had received death threats from white supremacists, including an ugly letter from KKK Grand Dragon Edward R. Fields. Baxley responded with a one-sentence missive typed on official stationery: “Dear Dr. Fields, my response to your letter of February 19, 1976, is kiss my ass. Sincerely, Bill Baxley, Attorney General.”

As Jones watched the testimony in the Jefferson County Courthouse, it became clear that Chambliss did not act alone in the bombing. The four girls killed — 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Carole Robertson, Addie Mae Collins and Cynthia Wesley — had been in the church basement preparing for Sunday service. Addie Mae’s sister, Sarah Jean Collins, who was 12 then, lost an eye in the explosion.

“As I gave my undivided attention to Baxley’s powerful closing argument,” Jones told a House crime subcommittee two decades later, “I never in my wildest imagination dreamed that one day this case and my legal career would come full circle, giving me the opportunity, some 24 years later to prosecute the two remaining suspects for a crime that many say changed the course of history.”

More than 20 years after Chambliss was convicted, Jones would become U.S. attorney in Alabama and set out to finish what Baxley started. He brought charges against two more Klan members, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr., and Bobby Frank Cherry.


The prosecutions have helped make him a contender in his Senate race against Republican Roy Moore, a controversial former judge. On Thursday, Moore was accused by a woman of initiating a sexual encounter with her when she was 14 and he was 32 — allegations he called “completely false” and his campaign dismissed as “the very definition of fake news.”

I remember that bombing and had traveled enough in the Jim Crow South by then to know that I had met little girls just like these four.
Both Condoleeza Rice and Angela Davis knew these little girls.

For many of us, these four deaths hit with a sickening thud.
Much like the Sandy Hook deaths, these children’s murders said we were not protecting our must vulnerable.

When an industry can take strong steps in the face of assaults on the most trusting and vulnerable and government makes excuses, e.g. the ballots are printed, have gone out, folks have voted early … there must be questions.

This is a special election for pete’s sake! It cannot be rescheduled? You cannot find a more honorable candidate and replace this child molester?

Apparently the answer to all of that is no.

I suggest: perhaps instead of a negative campaign against Roy Moore, child molester, a positive campaign in favor of Doug Jones, child defender, might be in order.

MORE at LINK ABOVE & at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/11/09/an-alabama-senate-race-conjures-the-awful-1963-church-bombing-that-killed-4-black-girls/?utm_term=.e02bbd600604
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"The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members" ~Mahatma Gandhi


There is a reason why, when you visit Hillary Clinton’s Twitter account, this is the tweet pinned to the top. It has been pinned there for a year and two days as of this writing,

Here:

Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton
@HillaryClinton
"To all the little girls watching...never doubt that you are valuable and powerful & deserving of every chance & opportunity in the world."

"Human Rights are Women's Rights"
Hillary Clinton, Bejing 1995

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