Doug Jones

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Welcome to The Ticket.

I'm Isaac Dover.

The past few weeks watching the coronavirus cases spike all over the country, I think we've all been left with a sense of what the hell is going on?

How could there be a new peak in the first wave of infections before we even got to a second wave?

A lot of people look at these numbers and wonder, why didn't the rest of the country learn from the initial outbreaks in New York, New Jersey, Washington State?

So with the country's attention focused on the pandemic's new front in the South, this seemed like the moment to talk with Doug Jones.

He's a senator from Alabama, but he's also a unique person to talk to in this moment of renewed thinking about race and legacy in America.

In 1997, Jones prosecuted two of the Klansmen responsible for the Birmingham church bombing.

The 1963 attack killed four young girls and was a galvanizing moment for the country.

It was key to the passage of the Civil Rights Act only a few months later.

Now here in 2020, deaths have again shocked the country and awoken a new wave of activism.

When I connected with Jones, he was at home in Birmingham.

With the Republican primary runoff next week, he's about to learn if he'll face Jeff Sessions or Tommy Tubberville in the general election.

Jones is the rare Democratic senator from the deep south.

He's widely seen as the most vulnerable Democrat up in November, and he knows it.

But he's fighting and he thinks he can win.

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Here's my conversation with Senator Doug Jones.

So, Senator, the last time I saw you was in March.

We were in Selma, Alabama for the anniversary of the Bloody Sunday march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

You gave a speech warning against how people in Washington were trying to turn Americans against each other.

How are we doing on that?

Well, I think as a whole, America is actually faring much better.

I think America is coming together like never before.

I think what you saw, quite frankly, after George Floyd's death, I thought you saw, and I still believe you see, a lot of America coming together to recognize the inequalities that we have, the inequalities in healthcare, education, economic opportunities,

and in the way that some folks are treated by law enforcement.

Is it because of the Floyd protests and the aftermath of it?

Is the pandemic bringing people together?

It feels like it often is exposing how divided and how unequal America is.

Yeah, I think it's really a combination.

I think it's the confluence of events.

I think as we got deeper into the healthcare crisis, we saw more and more how our minority communities were being affected.

You know, a lot of our black community were frontline workers, so they were exposed more.

And the more that that seemed to put a spotlight on so many of the inequities, then all of a sudden we saw what happened to George Floyd.

And people, I think, across the country, their consciousness just changed.

And you had so many Americans saying, see, see what we've been talking about, and so many others saying, yes, I do see that now.

And I apologize and I'm sorry that I've not seen it or done something about it beforehand.

So I've talked to people who say that we are being foolish to think that things are going to get better.

You already feel hopeful.

Look, I can't help.

I understand the cynicism that people have.

You only have to look back.

at what happened in this country in 1963, 64, and 65, the historic moments that created a number of changes, but they didn't finish the job.

And as we went on, we tended to start backsliding.

So I can understand that cynicism.

I just want to look at a glass half full.

And I would encourage folks to just not give up, to not let this moment pass, to not just sit back and say, well, it's never going to happen.

There's going to be too much resistance.

So let's just move on.

We have...

at this moment with this pandemic with an economic crisis with the spotlight on the racial disparities the most unique time in modern history, I believe, to really do things in a way to get rid of the systemic problems that we've got in this country and build a stronger and more just America.

This week you did an event with Dr.

Anthony Fauci and you warned that Alabama is still in very dangerous territory, that it's one of the cases where,

one of the states where cases are rising and rising fast.

Why are cases still rising in Alabama?

So many other parts of the world and even in the country have figured out how to keep cases low.

What's going on?

Well,

I think that most places in the country have not figured it out or if they figured it out they're just not following it.

I think Alabama and our governor did their very dead level best to try to open up the economy in a slow and methodical way.

But there was a lot of pressure, I think, and I don't mean just pressure from the administration.

I just mean community pressure that we've got to get out of our households.

We've got to start trying to live again.

And so the governor and others started opening up, but we're giving cautions that, you know, Alabama's governor's order went from a safe at home order and almost a stay-at-home order to a safer at home order.

But people just didn't listen to that as much.

They heard you can get out, you can go to restaurants, social distance, wear a mask.

but they didn't follow that advice.

And we saw, I think, Memorial Day, it was as if nothing was going on around this place, especially with younger folks.

And we're paying the price for that now.

I think everybody recognizes that when people refused to wear their mask, ignored the social distancing, started going to bars and restaurants and parties, it's created a problem.

And the concern now is that if we did that over the July 4th holiday with our already high levels that we've got now, we could be in serious, even really serious trouble at the end of July and going into August, which is when our schools are supposed to start.

Do you feel like enough people in Alabama are wearing masks?

No, I don't.

I think more and more, you are seeing more local officials, more business leaders saying, wear these masks.

Please take these precautions.

We just had, I think, seven, six or seven of the top 10 cities in Alabama have issued mask orders.

So local officials are taking control.

The way the pandemic hit, it mostly hit big cities first in a major way, and then over the course of the following weeks and months, spread to other places and more rural areas.

I wonder, do you think if it had been reversed, if

the pandemic had started in more rural communities, that our response to it might have been different and the way that we've handled it would have been different?

My view is that it would have been much, much worse.

had it hit in our rural communities and our underserved communities first, because it is those communities that do not have access to good health care that do not have the same quality of health care and first responders now having said that what what's so disappointing is that because it did hit in the urban centers first and i said this really early on to folks in in in rural alabama rural america that look This is right now centered in our more populated areas.

You folks in these rural areas where the population is more sparse have this opportunity to stop this in its tracks before it gets to you.

But you've got to do what we're being told to do in Birmingham and in New York and other places.

And that's start social distancing now.

Start self-quarantine.

Stay at home.

Let's do these things now.

And unfortunately, I don't think folks got that.

I mean, that's the frustrating thing, right?

It's incredibly frustrating.

But I will tell you that part of this is just the media messages.

And when I say this, I'm not being critical of the media because we've had to report things as we go.

So let's think about this.

The first thing we're hearing is, well, this is really affecting senior citizens and people in nursing homes.

So that let everybody have their guard down a little bit because that's all they heard.

Then it's affecting the city.

So the people in the rural areas saying, okay, that doesn't affect me.

Then there is even a racial component where it really affects African Americans and the black community and Latino community more.

So there was a sense of, okay, I'm probably not really at risk.

And there is just so much that we didn't know and that we were learning.

And as we learn it, we say things, we do things, and it lulls people, I think, a little bit.

And it is incredibly frustrating.

Here we are in July.

And to be in a situation in Alabama where every day we see a new record and every day we see more deaths.

And it's just not acceptable.

We hear a lot about, we've been talking about the health effects of this, but we hear a lot about the economic disparities that are exposed by this.

We're talking about a little while ago.

What do you see in Alabama and how the economic disparities are exposed in this?

Well,

we're studying and looking at that now.

But what I was told just this week was that out of the 600,000 plus people that stayed on payroll because of the paycheck security program, there was only a relatively small percentage of those being African-American.

Out of the, more importantly, the businesses, minority-owned businesses businesses that got PPP loans or grants was an incredibly small percentage that's very frustrating because we knew early on as that program developed that it was not getting to the smaller businesses minority owned businesses we knew it was not we made fixes and I think it helped but clearly the minority owned businesses and employees have been affected hardest by this and they're going to be the ones that have the hardest time reopening.

You know, about two weeks ago, the mayor of Birmingham, along with some of the top business leaders in this city, forged a project to try to do more to invest in the African-American community and the kids in our school system, which is overwhelmingly black into the city of Birmingham, leveraging their buying power, leveraging their employer power to try to get more minority-owned businesses into this community.

It was a major, major step, not unlike what happened in 1963 when business leaders in Birmingham forged an agreement with Dr.

King and Dr.

Abernathy and Fred Shuttlesworth to end the Birmingham marches and desegregate the city of Birmingham.

That's the second time you've invoked the early 60s, a sort of example of the moment that we are in now or a model of the moment.

And of course,

your career has been bound up in that.

In 1997, you were put in charge of the prosecution of two Klansmen responsible for the Birmingham church bombing.

At the time when that prosecution happened, it seemed to people in a way like it was sort of closing a chapter in history.

I don't think people, so we basically argued that this should not be a closure.

It should not close a chapter.

It really, you know, helps heal some wounds.

But it didn't close a chapter.

And I said, and I've said for 20 years now, we should never close that chapter.

We should always remember what happened in Birmingham and the changes that came from the events that occurred right here in our city, whether it was the fire hoses and the dogs or the church bombing in the course of one year in 1963.

And I think we are in a similar moment right now that we can't let pass.

Well, I wonder in the story of civil rights and

of reckoning with the legacy of segregation and the legacy of the South in this moment.

Where are we in that story?

Well, that's a really good question.

I think we have taken tremendous strides in that story.

I mean, there's no question.

You can just look around.

We focus a lot about civil rights in the South, but this is an American story.

It's not just a Southern story.

It's an American story.

We have more black elected officials now.

We have more folks integrated into society and schools.

But at the same time, we have also seen some slide backs, rollbacks of efforts to give people the right to vote and make it harder to vote.

And so I think we get a little complacent.

Dr.

King wrote about this in 1967 in his last book.

It's really easy to pass legislation and at the signing of the legislation think everything is accomplished.

I think to some extent that's what happened in the 60s.

Everybody patted themselves on the back.

It was an incredible victories.

And I don't mean at all to diminish those amazing victories, but doing things legally and statutorily is one thing.

Doing it in a way that people change is a completely different story.

And I think that there are so many times that we see an implicit bias that people don't even fully appreciate.

And now we are in that moment where everything seems to have come full circle and we are back to where people are recognizing.

what is going on in this country.

They're also recognizing this.

They're recognizing that regardless of what happens in the future on different things, we are becoming a more diverse America.

There is no question about that.

And people are seeing it.

They're accepting it.

They understand it.

And they want to make sure that we live as one America, one Alabama.

That's what we want to do.

We're going to take a short break.

When we come back, I ask Senator Jones about Confederate monuments and how the South has recently grappled with its legacy.

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What do you say to the people who want to honor the Confederacy?

I say, look, you can honor individuals who who fought, but we should not honor the Confederacy.

Remember, this was not our country.

This was the Confederate States of America.

It was a separate country that was taking up arms against the United States of America.

If you love freedom and you are a patriot, then you can't honor the Confederacy.

that was designed to protect.

It was not just a so-called states' rights issue.

That's just a fallacy and a revisionist history.

It was states' rights with regard regard to owning enslaved people.

I grew up in New York.

The legacy of the Civil War is seen differently there.

But for you, the way that things were in Alabama when you were growing up to where they are now, it must be just such a major change.

It is.

There's no question about it.

Look, there is a seismic shift going on, I think, across the country, and particularly in the South.

But do you remember when you were a boy, the way that people talked about the Confederacy?

I mean, Alabama was just such a different place then.

Yeah, I mean, look,

it's hard to explain, but it was never

thought that we were protecting

the institution of slavery.

It was defending our rights, defending against the encroachment.

of a federal government.

You know, people like George Wallace and some of the segregationists in America use that a lot.

Remember a lot of the Confederate symbols, the battle flag, the Confederate names, which by the way are across 31 or more states in this country, not just the states of the old Confederacy, but they're spread across the country.

Those were used as symbols of a resistance to a federal government encroaching on them.

And so that's how I remember, and I could be wrong.

I mean, I was just a kid, but I don't recall it being, you know, this is something that we should glorify because it was a time when we were able to own people.

That just didn't come up.

It was just more of a, quote, southern way of life, a more genteel society, and we didn't like the encroachment of the federal government.

Slavery just not a part of it.

And that's part of the revisionist history that has happened.

You know, recently, the Alabama Department of Archives, which was established in 1901, has issued a statement that said, we have got to make some changes here because when the Alabama, Alabama, this is a huge building, it's where all the Alabama history is

kept.

When we were formed in 1901, we were formed for the purpose of revising the history of the Confederacy and glorifying the Confederacy.

That was the purpose.

And so there are all of these amazing changes.

And by the way, 1901 was also the year that Alabama.

uh adopted a very racist constitution that is still in existence today Fortunately, so many pieces of it have been

declared unconstitutional, but the document exists still today.

We have the longest constitution among the 50 states.

It's just absurd.

With all of that history, what happened next door in Mississippi over the last few weeks with changing the state flag, that must have seemed so fast.

I mean,

it happened.

It seems mostly because of the larger pressure with the pinpoint of NASCAR and the SEC saying that they wouldn't participate in events with the Mississippi state flag as it was.

And that sports pressure actually pushed for a very fast change when you think about it in relation to how these things happen.

Isaac, I have to disagree with you.

This has taken decades to change.

Not very fast.

It has taken decades.

For 20 years, when I would give church bombing presentations, I would show a picture of protest outside of Birmingham schools in 1963, where kids were waving Confederate flags.

And I would always make the point, this is not a symbol.

of unification.

This is not a symbol of history.

That's not a history class that's sitting outside this high school.

This is a protest.

They're using that Confederate battle flag as a symbol of hate.

Remember, this conversation really came up in the fore after the Charleston shootings at Mother Emmanuel.

And South Carolina took some action.

A number of other folks took some action.

And Mississippi talked about it.

Georgia talked about things.

There were all manner of conversations.

And a lot of progress was made, but not as much progress.

And I do think that going above with NASCAR and those folks, I do think that that made a huge difference because our institutions that we all look to are finally coming to grips with this and saying we're going to make a change.

And I will tell you that that NASCAR pronouncement was as big a thing around here as anything else that could have been done by any institution of government that said an awful awful lot this has taken years of conversations and it's going to take some more conversations this is not something we can't rush into and when i say that i think that there is some urgency here but we need to get all of this right we need to make sure there's not backlashes we need to work with each other and have these dialogues so that we get it right this time and we not just do the same things.

The one thing that troubles me the most about this, and I've said this publicly to a lot of folks here in Alabama, is while I am all in favor of examining and removing these symbols and these monuments and things like that, I also don't want to lose sight of the fact.

that those are just symbols and they're monuments and they're not the barriers to racial inequalities.

And so I wonder, let me bring it back because you had talked about the 60s as a potential model for what we are going through now.

When you see how long we've been living with the legacy of what happened then and the mistakes that were made and the

good decisions that were made, when you look at this period of a couple months between the pandemic and the rethinking about Black Lives Matter and everything since George Floyd's death, how long are we going to be living with the legacy of this period?

Wow.

To be honest with you, I hope we live with it for a long time.

I mean, I hope we live with the fact and we are reminded of the things that pull people together, the things that people that divided folks.

I think that the legacy that we have witnessed now is going to last with us,

you know, for generations.

We should never forget how ill-prepared we were when this pandemic hit us.

And

that is something that I hope will never happen to the United States or the world again.

We were not prepared to do this.

Schools were not prepared.

Businesses were not prepared.

Government was not prepared.

We have got to learn from that so that we can prepare down the road.

And the inequality, the crisis, you know, I've called this kind of a...

crisis trifecta between the crisis of health, the crisis of the economy, and the crisis of inequality.

We can't let this moment pass and this moment has got to stay with us for a long, long time so that we can rectify and that we can come out of this.

You know, America is still the greatest country in the world.

It's the greatest country the world has ever seen.

But it doesn't mean that we're perfect.

It doesn't mean that we can't make it better and that we can't form that more perfect union where all people are created equal.

And when I say all people, I mean all people.

And so we can come out of this stronger, we can come out of it better, and we can come out of it with a much more just society.

I want to close by asking a couple of political questions about you since you are mixed up in this too and up for re-election in the fall.

The conventional wisdom, as I am sure you know, is that people say, Doug Jones, he's the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate.

You wouldn't be running if you didn't think you could win.

What are you seeing out there in Alabama that the punditry hasn't been seeing?

Well, you know, first of all, let's be honest, the punditry about being the most vulnerable is correct.

I don't think there's any doubt about that.

It's difficult, you know, to ride a ship sometimes.

On the other hand, we feel very confident of where we are because for the first time in, you know, 20 years or more, people have seen a Democrat who cares about them.

They're seeing a Democrat who is concerned about what's happening at the kitchen tables in Alabama, that is concerned about their health care and it's trying to do something about it, that's concerned about their children's education and it's trying to do something about it, and concerned about the inequalities that we have in this country, who has been talking about this for a long, long time, some to empty rooms almost, but now people are paying attention.

And so what I'm seeing and feeling in this state are so many people who have come up to us to say, you know, thank you.

Thank you for what you're doing.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you for taking our concerns.

We don't always agree with you on everything, but we know that you've got our back.

And I think that that's the key.

The Republican primary in Alabama, the runoff is next week.

It is probably the weirdest Republican race in the country.

I know your focus is on your race and not what's going on there so much, but you've got Jeff Sessions, who held the seat that you currently are in, trying to win it back,

trying to say everything he can to be nice to President Trump, and President Trump doing everything he can to insult and dismiss sessions at every turn, it seems like.

And then you've got Tommy Tuberville, former football coach, but also has quite a checkered history in his hedge fund career.

What does what's happening in that race tell you about what's going on in Alabama and then the Republican Party in Alabama?

Well, I think it tells you something of what's happened to the Republican Party in Alabama, not what's going on in the state of Alabama, but just what's happened to the Republican Party.

And I fought the Democratic Party a lot for this because National Democrats ignored the Southern Democrats for so long, and we had to go it ourselves.

And then all of a sudden, things got to a point in Alabama where our party was just not functioning properly.

And so there was not another voice out there.

And the Republican Party just became a party that you had to appeal to a small base in a primary, you know, 50% of an already small base in a primary in order to win a primary that was tantamount to an election, similar the way Democrats did it years and years ago.

And so what you've seen is that you really don't have a, what they call, generic Republican anymore.

I mean, all of the pundits that talk about my race talk about it being so difficult because of the just Republicans versus Democrats and generic Republicans.

What you're seeing is Republicans putting forth candidate after candidate after candidate who is flawed.

And we're going to be able to have the resources and the message out there to challenge that in a way that we challenged it in 2017 that Democrats have not been able to challenge for the last 20 years.

And when you challenge that way, with those resources, that's when Democrats can win races because we are reaching out to the people that vote, the people that we care about, the people that care about their families and their jobs and their economy, and they're putting the political and partisanship aside.

So, Tuber Villa Sessions, which one would you rather face?

You know, the answer to that is: I am ready to go.

It doesn't matter to me.

I think that they both have serious flaws.

On the one hand, you've got Jeff Sessions, who was a senator for 20 years, and you can't really point to anything that he has done for the people of this state.

He was more ideological.

On the other hand, you've got a coach in Tommy Tuberville who just wants to name call and trying to put this socialist label and has no substance.

He's not even really spent a lot of time in Alabama and has just come in to run for office.

And folks, I don't think, particularly care for that either.

Well,

you will find out next week whether you get the candidate behind door number one or door number two.

That's right.

And then we'll see what happens over the next couple of months.

But Senator, thank you for taking the time to talk about all this.

We We covered a lot of ground.

Really appreciate it.

Sure, Isaac.

It's my pleasure anytime.

And you know, it's interesting as we were talking, I had the door closed here in my little playroom.

As we were going through this thing, my wife walks in and she held up a little sign that said, no president above the law, good ruling from the Supreme Court.

I don't know if you've seen it, but apparently he's got to turn over some tax returns to somebody.

Yeah, that'll make for, I'm sure, a really calm, measured response from President Trump.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

My Twitter is blowing up.

My phone is catching on fire.

All right, Senator.

Thanks again for taking the time.

We'll talk soon.

Appreciate it.

My pleasure, Isaac.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

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