Bending Toward Justice is a dramatic and compulsively readable account of a key moment in America’s struggle for equality, related by an author who played a major role in these events.
A distinguished work of legal and personal history, the book is destined to take its place as a canonical civil rights history.
The book provides an inside look at how author Doug Jones, a former US attorney from Birmingham, and his role model, the former Alabama attorney general Bill Baxley, sent to prison three Birmingham Klansmen who murdered four black girls by dynamiting their church on Sept. 15, 1963.
The four children, aged 11 to 14 — Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Morris Wesley — died instantly in a women’s restroom where they were preparing for Sunday school.
Without Jones and Baxley, both white men born in Alabama and educated in the state’s law schools, the murders of the children killed on that “bloody Sunday” would have gone forever unpunished.
