2000: Doug Jones, a modern-day Atticus Finch searching for justice

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay was originally published in the Star-Telegram on June 4, 2000.

Last month, Mary Badham made her first pilgrimage to Monroeville, a town of 7,500 that calls itself the literary capital of Alabama. Like thousands of other tourists, she felt her heart leap at the sight of the old brick courthouse on the town square. It was as she had imagined from seeing its fictional counterpart in the movie To Kill a Mockingbird.

People noticed Badham among the crowd that Saturday because as a child she had played the tomboy Scout in that 1963 film, which was based upon Harper Lee’s great novel by the same title. Later Badham spoke in the courtroom and implored her 200 listeners to teach children about history and tolerance “so they will know everything will not just be given to them.”

That evening, the Mockingbird Players performed in the same courtroom, bringing Scout and her lawyer father, Atticus Finch, to life in a stage production. Once more, Finch fought against prejudice and perjury to represent a black man, Tom Robinson, who was wrongly accused of raping a white woman.

Badham’s visit from her home near Richmond, Va., coincided with another drama being played out on another stage in Alabama. Three days earlier, prosecutors announced the arrest of two aging former Klansmen for bombing the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on Sept. 15, 1963. Four black girls died in the basement that morning from an explosion of dynamite.

The crime shook the nation’s soul, much as Harper Lee’s great novel stirred its conscience when it was published in 1960. The faces of the four young martyrs stared from front pages, reinforcing Alabama’s image as a dark and bloody place.

Already, Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel had captivated millions of readers with its story of small-town injustice. In the character Atticus Finch, they admired the virtues of a brave and good man; in the four Alabama girls, they saw the real consequences of racial hatred.

As Lee’s novel continues to teach us about redemption, the latest chapter from Birmingham raises hope that justice finally may prevail in the bombing case. An intense U.S. attorney named Doug Jones declared that new evidence had allowed federal and state prosecutors, working together, to win indictments against Thomas Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry for the girls’ murder.

The two men, as records reveal, were among the FBI’s four prime suspects. Yet its director, J. Edgar Hoover, refused to act on that evidence. The case might have died right there had not a 28-year-old Alabama attorney general named Bill Baxley vowed to prosecute the bombers. After taking office in 1971, he pulled together an investigative team and began following leads.

The most promising one led to the FBI’s massive files on the case, but Baxley couldn’t pry them loose. Several years passed, and he confided his frustration with his friend Jack Nelson, an Alabama-born correspondent in Washington for the Los Angeles Times. Nelson went to the Justice Department and, according to Baxley, threatened to expose the FBI’s failure to cooperate. A little while later, Baxley gained access to the files. Piecing together this information with what his investigators had gathered, he won a murder conviction in 1977 of Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss.

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Baxley had been a second-year law student at the University of Alabama when the church bombing occurred. He remembers feeling sick that day at the Kappa Sig house as he listened to news reports. He had been toying with leaving the state of Alabama, but he decided to stay and help change things.

Only three months earlier, Gov. George Wallace had tried to block the entrance of two black students to the university. The incendiary words of the governor, many of them crafted by a Klansman named Asa Carter, raised the racial temperature, as violent men sought to stop integration with bombs and guns.

Today, many thoughtful people blame Wallace, at least in part, for fanning the flames for his own political ambition. As an opportunist and a defender of an intolerable system, he was the antithesis of Atticus Finch.

But faithful to the promise he made to himself in 1963, Baxley proved to be a different kind of politician - one who, unlike Wallace, remained true to his roots in the state’s earlier liberal tradition, which produced the likes of Gov. James E. “Big Jim” Folsom and U.S. Sen. Lister Hill.

These politicians sought to elevate the condition of common people, white and black, with the help of government. They did not appeal to racism for votes; rather, they practiced a politics based on class and attacked real issues such as poverty, ignorance and disease. Racial hysteria by the late 1950s largely destroyed this tradition, leaving the political field to a generation of demagogues and their violent henchmen.

After serving two terms as attorney general, Baxley ran for governor in 1978. Resentment over the Chambliss trial may have cost him the election. At every town he visited and in front of every plant gate where he greeted workers, there were people who refused to shake his hand.

Yet as blacks began to vote in significant numbers, overt racism waned in politics. Baxley went on to be elected lieutenant governor in 1982. Today, he practices law in Birmingham.

Many close observers of Alabama’s racial history, such as Morris Dees at the Southern Poverty Law Center, consider Baxley to be the hero of this tortured struggle for justice. His pursuit of suspects in the bombing case — men who were still dangerous - helped inspire this latest act in the drama.

Jones, the U.S. attorney in Birmingham, seems as resolute as Baxley to flush out and convict the guilty. “This was a tragedy of just absolute monumental proportions,” he said after presenting evidence to a state grand jury. An FBI-led task force reopened the case several years ago.

Prosecutors will try the two defendants in state court, where they can seek convictions for murder. Jones will participate under a special status granted him by the attorney general. The team will try to recreate a crime for jurors that took place nearly 37 years ago. Apparently, the prosecutors are depending upon witnesses to testify who once remained silent.

But new evidence may appear, especially from within the inner circle of a defendant’s family and acquaintances. In 1977, Baxley called to the stand Chambliss’ niece. She recounted hearing her uncle say he had never intended to kill the four girls. The testimony helped put Chambliss away.

William Faulkner observed that great stories flow from “problems of the human heart in conflict with itself.” The bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church and its aftermath involved more than racial violence. It was also about Southern white people realizing they could no longer ignore unspeakable evil. If a child worshiping in a house of the Lord was not safe from terror, then who was?

In 1997, the Alabama Bar Association placed a monument to the fictional Atticus Finch on the lawn of the Monroeville courthouse to commemorate equality before the law. Perhaps in time, a similar monument will rise in Birmingham - one dedicated to those who would not rest until justice was done.

This story was originally published December 15, 2017 at 3:39 PM with the headline "2000: Doug Jones, a modern-day Atticus Finch searching for justice."