Early in the century, when he was U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, former Senator Doug Jones prosecuted Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry, who as members of the Ku Klux Klan participated in the 1963 bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four girls. Here Jones talks to Heather Cox Richardson about the bombing, justice, healing, and what lessons we can take from the bombing and its aftermath today.

HCR writes about this time period in her Substack today, the anniversary of the bombing.