From Charlie Pierce:
This is, in its entirety, an email I received from Charlie Pierce because I subscribe to his political blog at Esquire magazine. I intend no copyright infringement, merely to inform. There is no way for me to link to the document, or I would do so.
The Current Carried Doug Jones Toward the Righteous Shore
"The best election night celebration I’ve ever attended was in Alabama on December 12, 2017. I had been in Alabama for a week. One of the things I did was to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, which was one of the most moving experiences of my life. The iron of the thing was still ringing
with history and the echoes of the truncheons. It was like the first time I walked Little Round Top, or the first time I wandered through Deeley Plaza. History comes to stay in some specific places like a haunt, quiet and suspended in time. The bridge was one of those places for me.
That evening, I drove back to the Sheraton in Birmingham where the supporters of Democratic candidate Doug Jones were gathered in anticipation of what they knew would be a very unlikely victory. Senator Jeff Sessions had been hired on—much to his eventual dismay—as Donald Trump’s attorney general. That forced a special election to replace Sessions in the Senate. Jones, a former federal prosecutor, and something of a legend in Alabama legal circles, won the Democratic nomination while Roy Moore, a renegade wingnut judge most famous for toting a massive stone memorial to the Ten Commandments across the country, had slipped through a crowded Republican field. It all went sideways for Moore late in the campaign when several women accused Moore of sexual misconduct. Suddenly, with Alabama’s Republicans in disarray, it looked like Jones might have better than a puncher’s chance. And that grew day by day, and almost hour by hour, until the ballroom at the Sheraton was perilously close to exploding with anticipation.
Hundreds of people locked into the New York Times’s election meter on their phones, watching the needle move slowly—crawl, really—further and further into Jones’s arc on the dial. Dozens of people held their phones out at arm’s length to take selfies with dozens of other people they did not know. Some print outlets called the race early but, this being the 21st century and all, nothing was official until somebody said it on television. When CNN finally did, I got hugs from more strangers in five minutes than I have in my whole life. It was like a great weight had risen from the people in the ballroom, and finally, for once, they could fly.
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Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore to become the United States Senator from Alabama.
People there told me that it had been like that 15 years earlier, when Jones, then the U.S. Attorney for Northern Alabama, had won convictions of two men named Thomas Blanton, Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry. Blanton and Cherry had been part of the Ku Klux Klan terrorist cell that had bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church on September 15, 1963, killing four young schoolgirls. Blanton and Cherry had been able to stay free because J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI had buried the evidence against them. Shortly after Jones was appointed by President Bill Clinton, the government declassified the files that Hoover had buried. Jones moved on Cherry and Blanton and got them convicted. When the verdicts came down, people say, everybody hugged strangers that day, too.
So, when Doug Jones got up on Wednesday, and he explained why he would vote to convict Donald Trump and remove him from office, he did so in the knowledge that it was going to complicate a re-election campaign that already looked like a long pull up a gravel road. But, watching him, I went back to the bridge that day, and I heard the whisper of the courage that still stays in the unyielding iron. The Civil Rights Movement remains the cleanest and strongest current in our history and, sooner or later, everyone trying to do right by the republic feels the need to tap into it. I believe Doug Jones voted to convict Donald Trump, regardless of the obvious political peril, in part because he felt the familiar strength of that current carrying him toward the righteous shore.
Mississippi was the bloodiest place, but Alabama was the place in the old South where the Civil Rights Movement broke the power of Jim Crow. The Freedom Riders saw their bus burned in Anniston. The movement went on. The march went from Selma to Montgomery. The march went across the bridge and into howling madness. The movement went on. On March 25, 1965, when the march moved from Selma to Montgomery, a woman from Detroit named Viola Liuzzo was shot to death from a moving car by elements of the local Klan. Four men, one of them an FBI informant, were indicted for her murder on state charges. Times being what they were, the four were not convicted.
But the federal government’s attitude toward these cases was shifting, and the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice brought federal charges against the four men, creatively applying an anti-Klan statute from 1871. The federal prosecutor was a quiet, fierce man named John Doar. The federal judge was Frank Johnson, Jr., who’d already used the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education to desegregate Alabama’s schools and public parks. After the Alabama state police assaulted the marchers at the bridge, Johnson granted them another permit to march, which encouraged President Lyndon Johnson to federalize the Alabama National Guard to protect the demonstrators.
In Frank Johnson’s court, Doar gradually drew the net around the four murderers, even though Liuzzo’s murder was not one of the charged offenses. Johnson saw what Door was doing, saw that the net was solid, and, even though he was not a fan of Dr. King’s methods, Johnson saw the law clearly. Doar won his case and Johnson sent the murderers to federal prison for the violation of Liuzzo’s civil rights. And here’s where John Doar’s story intersects with that of Doug Jones.
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John Doar (right) walks with James Meredith onto the Mississippi State campus in October 1962.
In 1973, the House Judiciary Committee was in need of a special counsel in the matter of Richard Nixon. Chairman Peter Rodino offered the job to John Doar, who accepted. Over the next several months, using the research techniques he had developed in prosecuting the killers of Viola Liuzzo, Doar gathered the evidence and built another net, strand by strand, until it strangled the life out of Nixon’s presidency. In doing that job, Doar tapped into the historical current that he first had ridden in Alabama a decade earlier. The Civil Rights Movement is something that sustains those who have remained true to its goals and purposes, who have kept faith with what it gave them.
What did people expect? That Doug Jones would be afraid? That a guy who faced down the Klan and found a way to get Viola Liuzzo justice would shrink from his constitutional duty in the face of some angry tweets and the possible loss of his Senate seat? Doug Jones has played for higher stakes than that, long before that wondrous night when he was elected to replace the execrable Jeff Sessions, against whom he may be running this fall.
Just as was the case with John Doar. What did the Nixon people expect? That a guy who’d walked James Meredith through the door at Ole Miss, and who had prosecuted the perpetrators of Klan violence, would get nervous over the possibility of being the target of the country-club criminals in the Nixon White House? Both men were sustained by the knowledge that, on the great moral issue of our times, they were on the right side. They knew the historical currents that led them to where they found a place to stand.
“With the eyes of history upon us, I am acutely aware of the precedents this impeachment trial will set for future presidencies and Congresses,” Jones told the Senate this week. “Unfortunately, I do not believe those precedents are good ones. I am particularly concerned that we have now set a precedent that a fair trial in the Senate does not include witnesses and documentary evidence, even when those witnesses have first-hand information and the evidence would provide the Senate and the American people with a more complete picture of the truth.”
The eyes of history were on the Senate for the past month. The eyes of history are clear and unsparing. They can, as Shakespeare’s Beatrice says, see a church by daylight. They looked upon a bridge in Alabama one day, and they’ve never forgotten what they saw. We can avert our eyes from the damage we do to the country, but history sees that at which we cannot—or will not—look. Otherwise, we might never find our way."
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for the hearts!!
in the ballroom, and finally, for once, they could fly."
This is what I'm looking forward to when tRump is gone for good.
Great piece, Volstork. Thank you.
KY.........
