The Bombs, the Church, the City, the State
This made me 
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a14409208/alabama-racism/
...And there is the 16th Street Baptist Church here in Birmingham, which has been a gathering place for African-Americans since it was finished in 1911. Paul Robeson sang there. W.E.B. DuBois and Mary McLeod Bethune spoke there. And, at 10:22 a.m. on September 15, 1963, a Sunday morning, a group of four white supremacist terrorists planted 15 sticks of dynamite in the church and blew it up, killing four little girls and injuring at least 20 other parishioners, and converted the 16th Street Baptist Church into one of those places that all Americans of a certain age know about instinctively, and one of those places that many Americans talk about with a familiar flinch in their memory.
The flinch keeps too many of us from remembering that this was the third bombing in Birmingham over the previous 11 days, and that the campaign of destruction came in the wake of a federal court decision mandating the integration of Birmingham’s public schools. The flinch keeps us from remembering that the people of the church rebuilt it in less than a year, that a stained-glass window was donated by some people in Wales who were shocked and disgusted by something that had happened in America. The flinch never has left our national mind. It keeps us from remembering that the forces that brought down the walls of the church still maintain a certain destructive power. The flinch is caused by something real, something dark, something alive...
In 1977, a Ku Klux Klan member named Robert Chambliss had been tried and convicted for his part in the crime, but the FBI and other investigators long had been convinced that Chambliss hardly acted alone. Now, over 30 years later, the FBI went back through the vast files it had accumulated at the time of the bombing. Eventually, two aging Klansmen, Bobby Cherry and Thomas Blanton were arrested and tried for their part in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. The two were convicted. Cherry died in prison and Blanton is still there. The prosecutor who put them there was an assistant U.S. Attorney named Doug Jones. He looked at the two old murderers and the flinch was not in him. He put them away....
In so many ways, while Roy Moore is running a ghost campaign, Doug Jones is running a haunted one. He called the entire city out on its flinch, and some people resent the hell out of the fact that he did. He called the anti-choice movement out on its toleration of its wilder fringes, and some people resent the hell out of that, too. But not all the ghosts in our history are evil. The spirits of Addie Mae Collins, Denice McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley called out over the decades for the peace and the justice they deserved. In 2001, their cries finally were heard.
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