Moving Alabama Into the Modern Age - The New York Times

The stars lined up for Doug Jones - the man who finally successfully prosecuted the perpetrator of one of  the most heinous crimes of the modern civil rights movement.  He finds himself in the United States Senate - a precarious spot given the white racist political domination of Alabama,  Howell Raines, himself an Alabaman, reviews Jones book about his legendary quest for justice. - gwc
Moving Alabama Into the Modern Age - The New York Times:
Review by Howell Raines March 26, 2019

BENDING TOWARD JUSTICE The Birmingham Church Bombing That Changed the Course of Civil Rights 
By Doug Jones 

 As he fell behind an accused sexual predator in returns from Alabama’s 2017 Senate election, Doug Jones admits, he allowed himself an almost “unbearable” lament familiar to thousands of frustrated Alabamians who came of age in the George Wallace era: “Oh, my poor home state.” Near midnight, it appeared that Jones’s pistol-waving opponent, the former Alabama Supreme Court justice Roy Moore, would join the century-long parade of reactionary buffoons Alabama’s white majority has sent to Congress and the governor’s mansion.

 But in the final count for that Dec. 12 election, a cresting wave of modern sentiment among black voters and white women in the state’s rich Republican suburbs handed Jones a 22,000-vote victory, making Alabama the last state of the old Confederacy to join the New South. It was the biggest upset in Alabama political history, especially given Jones’s background as a successful prosecutor of Ku Klux Klansmen who perpetrated the signature civil rights crime of the 1960s, the fatal bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham.  KEEP READING