“Bending Toward Justice: The Birmingham Church Bombing That Changed the Course of Civil Rights” is a valuable addition to the historical record of Alabama’s role as the battleground state of the civil rights revolution. It provides an inside look at how Jones, a former United States 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.

Image Credit... Claude Sitton/The New York Times

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” and memorialized in Spike Lee’s wrenching film “4 Little Girls” would have gone forever unpunished. (I was interviewed in Lee’s film, and my reports that first identified the four bombers by name were nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting by this newspaper in 1983.)

With this book, Jones invites us — indeed, challenges us — to look anew at the central paradox of the case. The three bombers were all convicted on evidence from confidential interviews and wiretaps conducted by F.B.I. agents who were on the scene in Birmingham in the mid-60s. Yet the agency’s Washington leadership sought at every opportunity to impede Jones, Baxley and their chief investigator, the former Alabama state detective Bob Eddy.

During the past year, I was lucky enough to talk to all three men in Alabama, and Jones’s account provides an opportunity to revisit both the remarkable dark-horse campaign that made him the first Democratic senator from the South’s reddest state in nearly three decades, as well as this tormenting saga of justice long delayed by Justice Department ineptitude and the personal malfeasance of the longtime F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover.

Jones’s account is evenhanded to a fault: He fails to emphasize the villainous role of Hoover as the chief reason that Robert “Dynamite Bob” Chambliss and his two thuggish accomplices, Tommy Blanton and Bobby Frank Cherry, were all old men before Baxley and Jones were able to put them behind bars in a series of three dramatic trials conducted in 1977, 2001 and 2002. A Justice Department task force reviewing F.B.I. misconduct in investigating crimes in Alabama proved that Hoover stalled the investigation in 1965, causing a delay that continued well beyond his death in 1972.