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Excited to be talking with @DougJones on tomorrow's #TheReidOut. Have been thinking a lot about the broad list of heroic actors who made voting rights possible, and who defended them to the end, including Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who wrote that stinging dissent in Shelby v. Holder.
Before he was "Senator Jones," Doug Jones was the guy who put two of the white nationalist domestic terrorists who blew up the 16th Street Baptist church, killing four little girls, in prison. https://www.history.com/news/how-doug-jones-brought-kkk-church-bombers-to-justice
Those girls: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair and Carole Robertson, had arrived at church for Youth Day and they, along with 20 other injured mostly women and children were met by dynamite. It was a ghastly act of white supremacist "messaging" to Black folk.
Make no mistake that terrorist act, like so many across the South from the minute Union troops were pulled out by "Rutherfraud" Hayes in that repugnant 1877 "compromise" which ended Reconstruction, was about enforcing segregation and denying voting rights. https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/apr/24
The 16th Street Baptist Church was the largest Black church in the area, and it was a civil rights meeting place that Dr. King and others had used to organise marches opposing segregation and demanding equality under the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.
The bombing came just WEEKS after the August 28, 1963 March on Washington, which was itself held on the eight year anniversary of the slaughter of Emmett Till by white Mississippi men who felt and in fact functionally WERE, free to kill at will, any Black person they chose.
John Lewis was the youngest speaker at the March, and he wasn't there to laud the progress America had made, but to say the Kennedy Civil Rights bill was inadequate, in that it would leave millions of Americans still poor and living under a police state.
Johnson took up the Kennedy Civil Rights Act and jammed it through -- like Mitch McConnell but with a soul or Harry Reid at the height of his powers or @SpeakerPelosi any day of the week -- after JFK was assassinated by a fanatic in Johnson's home state of Texas that November.
But he couldn't get voting rights in it, due to the recalcitrants of southern Dixiecrats (many of whom would soon switch parties in revolt and become Republicans, despite that being the party of their most hated figure: Abraham Lincoln...) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/28/republicans-party-of-civil-rights
John Lewis and fellow marchers took a vicious beating on a bridge named for a notorious Klan leader, from racist Selma, Alabama sheriffs, and the televised scandal and national outrage helped get President Johnson to back a separate 1965 Voting Rights Act.
The Act, paid for by the blood of John Lewis and so many other men and women including Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney, Medgar Evers and ultimately Dr. King, is what Chief Justice Roberts and the other conservative justices tossed into the trash in 2010... https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/court-cases/shelby-county-v-holder
It was something of a career-long dream for John Roberts, and a nightmare for nonwhite voters, who have been paying for it with the return of relentless voter suppression, in the Nixon-plus era by Republicans, ever since. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/john-roberts-voting-rights-act-121222
The decision has in fundamental ways broken our politics, put fuel in the fire of white supremacy and voter suppression, and left Thurgood Marshall likely rolling in his blessed grave. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/07/how-shelby-county-broke-america/564707/
And Ruth Bader Ginsburg's dissent in Shelby was so epic, it turned her into a rock star, and alongside her relentless fight for women's equality including pay equality, crowned her as the Notorious RBG. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/09/18/i-dissent-justice-ruth-bader-ginsburgs-most-memorable-opinions/2661426002/
So yes, very much looking forward to closing that circle with the Senator from the state that barely escaped having a Senator Roy Moore, where Jefferson Sessions put the capital S in "suppression," and that includes a city folks used to call "Bombingham." https://www.al.com/news/erry-2018/07/f39190a3553390/bombingham.html
UPDATE: Senator Jones will be on the show on TUESDAY, not Monday. Some scheduling changes occurred.
