Doug Jones is the literal antithesis of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, the Klansman who sits in the Attorney General’s chair.
Jones, serving as US attorney, won convictions against two Klan members who murdered four young African-American girls by bombing the church they were attending. And as he was running for the seat vacated by Klansman Sessions, he did not shy away from this history, from the fight for social justice, or from identity politics:
Friday was the anniversary of the Birmingham church bombing that killed four girls in 1963. The prosecutor who brought the men responsible to justice, former U.S. Attorney Doug Jones, is now a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate. Jones urged Americans, Alabamians and their leaders to stand up to hate.
“Over the past month, we’ve seen the purveyors of hatred and division rear their ugly heads in Charlottesville and around the country,” said Jones, who prosecuted KKK members responsible for the deadly Sept. 15, 1963, bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church.
Jones said that he is committed to continuing his fight for equality and civil rights in the U.S. Senate. As U.S. attorney for North Alabama, Jones reopened the investigation into the church bombing more than three decades after the shocking crime.
Jones said that he is concerned about the re-emergence of hate groups, especially the recent white supremacist activity, and what he considers to be the weak response from some officials and candidates, including his opponents.
“That is not who we are,” Jones said. “America is a nation of laws, justice, equality and opportunity and we must push back against those who threaten those fundamental American values.”
Jones said it would dishonor the memory of those four innocent girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Carol Denise McNair, for the United States to turn back to those dark days. (emphasis added)
To turn back to those dark days is exactly what Roy Moore espoused (things were better under slavery, if you hadn’t known):
Jones’ campaign said in a statement that in contrast to Jones’ work in Civil Rights, Republican Candidate Roy Moore spoke to a “meeting of white nationalists” – the Council of Conservative Citizens – in 1995
Doug Jones didn’t have to bring the case against two Klansmen when he was US Attorney, a half-century after the murders were committed. After all, crimes against African-Americans don’t really matter:
… we have seen news shows highlight children who have gone missing, and these shows will focus on one case for a long time. But what is missing from these shows? Have you watched these national programs? Do you notice something? It is most rare that you see ongoing news stories about minority victims. The high profile cases almost always focus on Caucasian victims. While I want to see the media covering such cases, I also want them to give time to minority victims as well. There is a void when it comes to coverage involving minority murder victims. I wrote about this in 2007, hoping that the media would make an effort to equalize reporting. Sadly, I have not seen much improvement. I bet you would be surprised to know that African American girls make up 43% of missing children. It is staggering.
I bet you also didn't hear of the Rocky Mount murders. Ten women were missing. Since 2005 nine women's bodies turned up near bridges and woods in a small area with a population of around 60,000. Sounds like big national news, right? You would think this would be a case covered daily on the crime shows. Alas, few have heard much about it. Why? The victims have been poor, African American females who fit the profile I created in 2007 of ignored crime victims. President of the local NAACP chapter Andre Knight pointed out that if the victims had been Caucasian, that it would not have taken so many victims before a pattern was recognized. And he is absolutely right. The women had known each other and resided in the same areas. To anyone in law enforcement, this should have raised a giant warning flag. There has been one conviction in a single murder, yet the others remain open. (emphasis added)
Doug Jones didn’t have to bring this case, but he did, and he secured justice.
He did not downplay his legacy, he made it central to his campaign message.
He explicitly ran against white supremacy.
In Alabama.
For Jefferson Beauregard Sessions’ seat.
And won.
Truly justice in it’s most poetic form.
******
Just as this victory belongs to the African-American women of Alabama who came out in force for Jones (and they are the very core of the Democratic base, its most reliable voters), who understood better than anyone what Roy Moore represented (they’ve seen white men like him hold power in their state their whole lives, and for generations before), this election was a testament to the power of memory; the memory of four little girls murdered by white men who assumed they would never be held to account, the memory of what men like Moore and Sessions have perpetrated since the days before secession, the memory of an atrocity that Doug Jones refused to let Alabama and the country forget.
A few days after Doug Jones commemorated the anniversary of the 1963 church bombing, I wrote a diary about another social justice warrior, Bryan Stevenson, founder and president of the the Equal Justice Initiative. A civil rights attorney, Mr. Stevenson, through the EJI, has overseen the creation of The Memorial to Peace and Justice, which includes a national memorial to lynching. It seemed especially fitting this morning to revisit that diary, which is about the power of memory:
Don’t shame conservatives, Trump voters? Shame on us if we don’t. Telling the truth about lynching. (Sept. 17, 2017)
Racial terrorism forced millions of black people to flee the South during the first half of the 20th century and played a major role in shaping the demographic geography of America by creating large black populations in urban communities in the North and West.
The national memorial to lynching victims will be one of the nation's most ambitious projects relating to the history of racial terror lynchings. EJI has purchased six acres of land atop a rise that overlooks the City of Montgomery and out to the American South, where terror lynchings were most prevalent.
The memorial is constructed of hundreds of floating columns on which the names of lynching victims from over 800 counties across the United States will be inscribed.
One of the painful lessons of the Shoah (Holocaust) for Jews, is that people (both individuals and whole societies) will actively try to forget their own terrible history, and in doing so, try to erase communal responsibility, and the legacy of hatred that persists to this day. To resist this, we must instead insist on remembering:
Who were the "six million" murdered in the Holocaust? The number is so large it is almost impossible to comprehend. It does not convey who they were, where they lived, information about their families, what their dreams were, how they died, or whether and how they were related to us.
The Jews are a people of memory. Our history is an integral part of us and we pass it from generation to generation. Each year we tell the story of Passover–the exodus from Egypt–and recall the revelation at Mount Sinai. In the Yizkor prayer recited on the Jewish holidays we remember the collective tragedies of our people as well as our own personal losses. Every year we commemorate the yahrzeits (anniversaries) of deceased relatives.
Millions of our brethren were murdered without a trace during the Shoah. It is incumbent upon us to remember them. If we do not take action, their legacies will be lost to us forever. Since 1955, Yad Vashem has been fulfilling its mandate to preserve the memory of Holocaust victims by collecting their names, the ultimate representation of a person’s identity, as it is written: "And to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name (Yad Vashem), an everlasting name that shall not be cut off." (Isaiah 56 : 5)
The genocide of Africans held in bondage, upon which the United States was built (much as the nation was founded upon the genocide of Native Americans), is something many white Americans have actively worked to erase from our collective memory, a white-washing of our history. This deliberate amnesia has brought us to a place where white supremacists occupy the White House, and naked bigotry has been normalized in every white community across the country...
Ultimately, the reckoning with our past requires us to see the basic elements of white supremacy pervade every aspect of our culture, our institutions, our economy:
The true evil of American slavery was the narrative we created to justify it. They made up this ideology of white supremacy that cannot be reconciled with our Constitution, that cannot be reconciled with a commitment to fair and just treatment of all people. They made it up so they could feel comfortable while enslaving other people.
I really believe that narrative was the true evil, and it's the thing that didn't get abolished in 1865. If you read the 13th Amendment, it talks about ending involuntary servitude and forced labor, but it doesn't say anything about the narrative of racial difference, the ideology of white supremacy. Because of that, I've argued that slavery didn't end in 1865; it just evolved. We had decades of terrorism and violence and lynching. The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war. There was no actual accountability. There was no reckoning. There was no acknowledgment that slavery was wrong at some fundamental level.
The failure of that transition means that even today, we're dealing with a narrative of racial difference. My work is aimed at trying to confront the burdens that people of color in this country face, which are heavily organized around presumption of dangerousness and guilt. It doesn't matter how educated you are, it doesn't matter how many degrees you have — you will go places in this country if you're a person of color and you will be presumed dangerous or guilty, and you're going to have to overcome that presumption. (emphasis added)
That the basic narrative of white supremacy persists at the core of our national identity is reflected in who we choose to commemorate:
What we do in the memorial spaces says a lot about who we are. The American South is littered with the iconography of the Confederacy. We are celebrating the architects and defenders of slavery. I don't think we understand what that means for our commitment to equality and fairness and justice.
While we celebrate this victory, and honor those that achieved it, we must not forget the people who voted for Roy Moore:
Jones won the election with 49.9 percent of the vote, while Moore received 48.4 percent. Write-in candidates made up 1.7 percent of votes in the race, according to CNN exit poll data.
On average, women preferred Jones by 57 percent, according to CNN, but the breakdown differed greatly by race. Black women were a particularly important demographic for Jones’s win, turning out in big numbers in a way that was reminiscent of Democratic turnout for former President Barack Obama.
Ninety-eight percent of black women voted for Jones, while 63 percent of white women voted for Moore. About 30 percent of white voters overall chose Jones, CNN reported.
Yesterday, the decent people of Alabama, especially the African-American women, who do not have the luxury of short-memories, took a monumental step towards setting the country right. It is only fitting that they were the decisive voices in this contest.
Poetic justice.