On December 12 – more than five decades after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham — the people of Alabama made clear their intention to set right the hateful murders and destruction. They chose to trust the women who asserted that Republican candidate Roy Moore had sought them out and acted indecently towards them and they delivered their verdict that Moore was not fit to represent the people of Alabama in the U.S. Senate.
The people of Alabama made it clear to each other, to the people of the United States and the world that they preferred Doug Jones, who had the caliber and courage to successfully prosecute the Klansmen who perpetrated the bombing and repudiate their effort to resist the end of segregation
This landmark event is extremely significant historically just as was the prosecution, conviction and imprisonment of the four Klansmen bombers. This election sends a message that will resonate into the ages that the Klansmen, in the words of former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have failed to “suck the hope out of young lives, bury their aspirations and terrorize their lives into perpetuity.”
It is proof of the truth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
I join novelist and social critic Lillian Eugenia Smith in her prayer, written in 1956, that we shall soon act as one people in the United States and live up to the expectations of our founding fathers who committed themselves to forming a more perfect union and be true to our motto: E Pluribus Unum.
Dr. Velandy Manohar is a charter member of the Connecticut Multicultural Health Partnership. A native of India, he has been a physician in the U.S. since 1967.