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The Alberta Jones Project: Murder of a Trailblazer · Murder Files Unsealed

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I want you to put yourself in the sweltering heat
• 0:03
  of August nineteen sixty five.
• 0:05
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, that heavy Midwestern summer.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: Exactly, the air in the Ohio Valley is just incredibly thick.
• 0:10
  It's that kind of humidity that just sits right on
• 0:12
  your chest, you know, making it genuinely hard to breathe.
• 0:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's totally oppressive.
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: But beneath that physical heaviness, there is this undeniable electricity
• 0:22
  just humming through the entire country. We are exactly one
• 0:25
  day away from President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the landmark
• 0:29
  Voting Rights Act into.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: Law, which is just a massive tectonic shift for civil
• 0:34
  rights in America.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Exactly. The nation is quite literally preparing to take this
• 0:39
  historic leap forward. But while the pens are being ready
• 0:42
  for that legislation in Washington, d C. Downe, Loeuville, Kentucky,
• 0:46
  a horrific discovery is being made.
• 0:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a completely jarring contrast.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: In the murky waters of the Ohio River, the body
• 0:52
  of a thirty four year old woman is pulled to
• 0:54
  the surface, and her name is Alberta Odell Jones.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: It is just a profound and frankly, deeply tragic juxtaposition.
• 1:03
  It really is, because here is a woman who spent
• 1:06
  her entire adult life fighting to ensure that very legislation
• 1:10
  would actually matter on a practical level, right, and she
• 1:13
  doesn't even live to see it signed.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's heartbreaking.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: And what's fascinating here is that we are not just
• 1:18
  looking at some standard true crime mystery. We are exploring
• 1:22
  the life of this pioneering black woman attorney who was
• 1:28
  who was basically shattering racial and gender barriers simultaneously.
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: Which was incredibly dangerous at the time.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely, doing either of those things in that era
• 1:37
  was basically an invitation to extreme violence. But Alberta Jones
• 1:41
  was registering thousands of voters, she was negotiating contracts for
• 1:45
  future global icons.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: She was a total force of nature, she really was.
• 1:48
  Speaker 2: Yet historically speaking, her incredibly consequential life story has been
• 1:52
  almost entirely obscured by the well the long dark shadow
• 1:56
  of her unsolved assassination.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: And that is exactly what we are setting out to
• 2:00
  correct today in this deep dive. We are pulling from
• 2:02
  a massive stack of sources.
• 2:04
  Speaker 2: Yeah, we have a lot of ground to cover, we
• 2:06
  really do.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: We're looking at Department of Justice, records, historical archives, documentaries,
• 2:12
  and the really vital ongoing research from the Alberta.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Jones Project, which has done amazing work.
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: They have. So our mission today is to uncover the life,
• 2:22
  the staggering professional achievements, and the tragic murder of this
• 2:25
  forgotten titan of the civil rights era. Because okay, let's
• 2:29
  unpack this.
• 2:30
  Speaker 2: For a second, Right, let's dive in to truly.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Understand why Alberta Jones was killed and why she was
• 2:36
  considered such an existential threat to the status quo. We
• 2:39
  first have to understand the barrier shuttering life.
• 2:42
  Speaker 2: She led, yes, exactly, we have to look at the
• 2:44
  environment that forged her.
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: Right, So where does her story actually begin?
• 2:49
  Speaker 2: Well, she was born on November twelfth, nineteen thirty, in Louisville, Kentucky.
• 2:53
  Her parents were Odell and Sarah Francis Crawford Jones, though
• 2:56
  her mother went by Sadie Oh. Right, And if we
• 2:59
  want to stand her crucible her origin story, we really
• 3:03
  have to look closely at the geographical and the political
• 3:06
  reality of Louisville in the nineteen thirties and forties.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: Right, Because it wasn't the Deep South, but it wasn't
• 3:11
  the North either.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Historians refer to it as a border town. It
• 3:15
  sat right on the edge of the Deep South in
• 3:17
  the Midwest, right there on the Ohio River.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: I want to pause on that term border town because
• 3:22
  I think it's important. When we talk about the Jim
• 3:24
  Crow era, the narrative usually focuses on the absolute spectacular
• 3:28
  brutality of places like Mississippi or Alabama, right.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: The things that made the evening news.
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly, So, how does a border town function differently
• 3:38
  mechanically speaking when it comes to segregation.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: It's a great question. Basically it functions through hypocrisy and
• 3:44
  invisible walls.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: Okay, what do you mean by that.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: Well, in the Deep South, the suppression was absolute and monolithic, right,
• 3:50
  It was enforced by law, but also by constant overt terror.
• 3:55
  Louisville lacked some of that daily spectacular violence. You didn't
• 3:59
  necessarily have violence mob rule controlling every single street corner. However,
• 4:03
  segregation was still deeply, deeply entrenched. It was just heavily institutionalized.
• 4:08
  It was basically baked into the zoning laws and the economy.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: So it was more systemic, less overtly violent on a
• 4:15
  daily basis.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: Exactly, Black Loavillians were primarily restricted to living in the
• 4:20
  West End, Educational opportunities were strictly segregated, and the economic
• 4:24
  ceiling was extraordinarily low.
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: So it's almost this psychological paradox. Yeah, you are living
• 4:32
  in a city where you can physically see the prosperity
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  and the wealth of the white population just a few
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  miles away.
• 4:39
  Speaker 2: Yes, it's right there in front of you, but you.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: Are constantly told by the institutions around you that absolutely
• 4:45
  none of it belongs.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: To you, exactly. That it is a total psychological pressure cooker.
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  You aren't crushed by overwhelming despair because the opportunity is visible,
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  but you're constantly hitting these invisible barriers.
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  Speaker 1: That has to be so frustrating.
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  Speaker 2: It is, But in an environment and like that, a
• 5:00
  very specific type of visionary resilience often emerges. You start
• 5:04
  to realize that the barriers are artificial constructs, right, they
• 5:08
  aren't natural laws.
• 5:09
  Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense.
• 5:10
  Speaker 2: Her sister, Flora Shanklin, actually recalled Alberta's fierce independence from
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  a very young age. Oh really, Yeah, in a city
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  where these socially acceptable avenues for black women were severely confined,
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  mostly to domestic work, or maybe teaching in underfunded schools.
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  Alberta looked at those boundaries and just decided she was
• 5:29
  simply going to walk right through them, which brings.
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: Us to her educational journey, which is just staggering. When
• 5:35
  you map out.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: The timeline, it really is impressive.
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: She graduates from Lousville Central High School in nineteen forty eight,
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  and from there she goes to the louivill Municipal College
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  for Negroes. But what really stands out to me here
• 5:47
  is her major.
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  Speaker 2: Right. She doesn't study what you might expect exactly.
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: She doesn't study education or the humanities. She majors in accounting,
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  and she graduates third in her class.
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  Speaker 2: Accounting is such a revealing choice, isn't.
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: It really is? Why accounting? You know?
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  Speaker 2: It tells us everything about her mindset. Accounting is the
• 6:04
  language of business. It's the language of leverage and financial independence.
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: She's learning how the machine.
• 6:10
  Speaker 2: Works, exactly. She is acquiring a hard, practical skill that
• 6:14
  decodes how power and money actually flow in a society.
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  She's arming herself with the technical knowledge to navigate contracts
• 6:22
  and ledgers.
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: And she takes that technical foundation directly into the legal
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  world in the mid nineteen fifties, the university systems in
• 6:31
  Kentucky start these these incredibly slow desegregation.
• 6:36
  Speaker 2: Efforts, very halting, reluctant efforts.
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: Right, So, in nineteen fifty six, Alberta Jones transfers into
• 6:42
  the University of Louisville Law School. She is the very
• 6:44
  first African American woman to ever attend.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: Which is a massive achievement on its own, it is.
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: But here is where I get a little confused looking
• 6:52
  at her timeline. She breaks this huge color barrier at
• 6:55
  U of L and then she leaves after just one year.
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: Why it does seem addit first glance.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because usually the historical narrative is all about enduring
• 7:03
  that hostile space to prove a point. Right, leaving feels counterintuitive.
• 7:07
  Speaker 2: It feels counterintuitive until you look at where she actually
• 7:09
  went next. She didn't drop out. She transferred to Howard
• 7:12
  University School of Law in Washington, d C.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 7:15
  Speaker 2: And this is arguably the most crucial pivot point in
• 7:18
  her entire life. You have to understand what Howard Law
• 7:21
  represented in the late nineteen fifties. It was not just
• 7:25
  an academic institution.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: What was it.
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: It was basically the strategic war room of the civil
• 7:31
  rights movement.
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: Wow, explain the mechanics of that. How does a law
• 7:34
  school function as a war room.
• 7:36
  Speaker 2: Through its specific pedagogical philosophy. Under the leadership of legal
• 7:41
  giants like Charles Hamilton Houston and later his protege Thurgood Marshall,
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  Howard law operated on a very specific premise, which was
• 7:50
  they believed that a lawyer is either a social engineer
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  or a parasite on society.
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, that is a heavy mandate, right.
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  Speaker 2: They weren't just teaching students how to read towards her
• 8:00
  memorize case law so they could go practice like real
• 8:02
  estate law. They were actively discepting the United States Constitution
• 8:06
  to find the structural weaknesses and the Jim Crow system.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: So they were training activists.
• 8:11
  Speaker 2: Basically exactly when Alberta Jones transfers to Howard, she is
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  leaving a local university where she was this isolated token
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  in a hostile environment, and she's stepping into a strategic
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  training ground.
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: That makes total sense.
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  Speaker 2: Now she is being mentored by the very architects of
• 8:25
  the legal civil rights movement. She is learning how to
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  use the law as a weapon to dismantle systems, not
• 8:33
  just as a shield to survive them.
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  Speaker 1: That completely reframes her entire trajectory. For me, she wasn't
• 8:39
  just getting a degree, she was getting military grade legal training.
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  So she serves on the Howard Law Journal, she works
• 8:45
  as a student counselor, and she graduates fourth in her
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  class around nineteen fifty.
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  Speaker 2: Eight, top tier of her class.
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. And then she comes back to Kentucky to take
• 8:53
  the bar exam. And this detail, this is just fascinating.
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  She actually studies for the bar exam in the office
• 9:00
  of Senator John Sherman Cooper.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, a sitting US senator literally offered his office as
• 9:04
  a study space for her.
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  Speaker 1: It is just a striking just to position because here
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  is a black woman who still cannot easily eat at
• 9:11
  certain lunch counters or you know, live in certain neighborhoods
• 9:14
  in her own hometown. Right, yet she is preparing for
• 9:18
  her legal career inside the office of a powerful federal lawmaker.
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: It really speaks to her incredible ability to navigate different
• 9:26
  strata of power. She was comfortable in those rooms, really,
• 9:29
  and she passes the Kentucky bar in nineteen fifty nine.
• 9:32
  She becomes one of the very first African American women
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  to ever do so in.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: The state, and she doesn't waste a single second after that.
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  Her education was explicitly preparation for a larger battle. Right
• 9:43
  literally the day after she learned she passed the bar,
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  she takes on her first case.
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  Speaker 2: Which was a divorce case for a friend she had
• 9:49
  promised to represent years earlier.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but as the following year in nineteen sixty, where
• 9:54
  she steps into a completely different arena and makes history again.
• 9:59
  And this is where that background you mentioned really comes
• 10:01
  into play.
• 10:02
  Speaker 2: Yes, this is a huge moment.
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: She takes on a neighbor from the West End as
• 10:06
  a client, a young, incredibly fast rising local boxing talent
• 10:11
  named Cassius Marcellus Clay Junior, who.
• 10:13
  Speaker 2: Of course the world would very soon know as Muhammad Ali.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Let's really look at the sheer scale of what
• 10:19
  she accomplished here, because negotiating a boxing contract in nineteen
• 10:23
  sixty is not like negotiating a brand deal today.
• 10:25
  Speaker 2: Oh, not even close.
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: Alberta Jones negotiates his first professional boxing contract. She introduces
• 10:32
  him to the legendary trainer Archie Moore out in California,
• 10:37
  and we actually know the mechanics of this contract, which
• 10:39
  is amazing.
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it literally hangs in the Muhammad Ali Center in
• 10:42
  Louisville today.
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: Right. She didn't just assign them up for some fights.
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  She built this incredibly complex financial fortress around him. She did,
• 10:51
  she said, up a trust that protected fifteen percent of
• 10:53
  his earnings until he reached the age of thirty five,
• 10:57
  and she legally positioned herself as a co trustee to
• 11:00
  ensure absolutely nobody could.
• 11:02
  Speaker 2: Touch it, which requires an astonishing level of foresight and
• 11:05
  courage on her part.
• 11:06
  Speaker 1: Why courage?
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: Specifically, we have to unpack the reality of the sports world,
• 11:10
  particularly professional boxing, in the mid twentieth century. It was notoriously.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Predatory and mob connected, right.
• 11:16
  Speaker 2: Deeply intertwined with organized crime. The standard business model for
• 11:20
  boxing promoters was essentially indentured servitude. Young athletes, especially young
• 11:25
  black athletes from impoverished backgrounds, were routinely legally exploited.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: It is just a meat grinder, it really was.
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  Speaker 2: They would be advanced money for craning and living expenses,
• 11:36
  then charged exorbitant fees, completely drained of their fight purses,
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  and ultimately left with absolutely nothing once their physical prime
• 11:44
  was over.
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  Speaker 1: So she wasn't just walking into the casino to play
• 11:47
  their games. She was rewriting the house rules completely.
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: By putting herself as co trustee in Allie's contract, she
• 11:56
  effectively built a legal moat around his earnings, a mote
• 12:00
  that the corrupt boxing establishment couldn't cross.
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: That's a great way to put it, But.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: How does a young black female attorney even enforce a
• 12:07
  contract like that in a world dominated by mob connected promoters.
• 12:11
  Speaker 2: By understanding the absolute leverage of the law, promoters operated
• 12:15
  on intimidation and opaqu accounting.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: Right, smoke and mirrors.
• 12:18
  Speaker 2: But remember her degree from Louisville Municipal College. She understood ledgers.
• 12:23
  A trust is a legally binding fiduciary entity.
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: Okay, so they can't just ignore it.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: No, they can't. By locking fifteen percent of his gross
• 12:31
  earnings into a trust where the principle cannot be dispersed
• 12:35
  until age thirty five without the explicit, legally recorded consent
• 12:39
  of the co trustee, which was her, she removed that
• 12:43
  money from the daily cash flow of the boxing syndicate.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: That is brilliant, right.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: If a promoter tried to withhold that fifteen percent or
• 12:50
  skim from it, they weren't just cheating a young fighter anymore.
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: What were they doing.
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: They were committing federal wire fraud and violating trust law
• 12:58
  against an attorney who had just trained under Thurgood Marshall.
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, So she trapped them.
• 13:04
  Speaker 2: She absolutely trapped them in a legal framework they couldn't
• 13:07
  punch their way out of. Historical accounts actually credit her
• 13:10
  as the first woman, black or white, to ever draft
• 13:13
  a professional athlete's contract in the United States.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: It is just staggering. She essentially weaponized contract law to
• 13:20
  protect a black athlete from a white dominated exploitation machine, exactly.
• 13:25
  And she doesn't stop her ascent there, not even close.
• 13:28
  In nineteen sixty four, she has appointed city attorney in
• 13:30
  Jefferson County. She becomes the first woman of any race
• 13:34
  to hold.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: That role, which is another massive glass ceiling shattered, right.
• 13:39
  Speaker 1: And then in February nineteen sixty five, she becomes a
• 13:42
  prosecutor in Louisville's domestic Relations Court, the first black woman
• 13:46
  in that position.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: This is a really pivotal role for her.
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: Let's look at what the actual data day mechanics of
• 13:51
  that job entailed, because just reading the phrase domestic relations
• 13:55
  court in nineteen sixty five feels incredibly loaded.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: Oh it is deeply loaded.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: What did it actually look like when she walked into
• 14:02
  that courtroom?
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: It looked like a radical inversion of the entire social order.
• 14:06
  A domestic relations court handles family disputes, child support, and crucially,
• 14:11
  domestic violence. You have to understand the profound societal disruption.
• 14:15
  Her very existence in that role represented. The entire structure
• 14:19
  of the nineteen sixty South was predicated on the absolute,
• 14:22
  unquestionable supremacy of white men.
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah, the hierarchy was rigid, exactly.
• 14:27
  Speaker 2: The law historically was designed by them and for them.
• 14:31
  So for a black woman to possess the state sanctioned
• 14:34
  power to stand in a courtroom, look down at a
• 14:37
  white man from the prosecutor's table, judge his actions, and
• 14:41
  physically utilize the power of the state to punish him
• 14:44
  for abusing his spouse, this is huge. It was an
• 14:47
  inversion of the racial and gender hierarchy that many in
• 14:51
  that society found deeply viscerally intolerable.
• 14:54
  Speaker 1: I mean, she is actively wielding the power of the
• 14:58
  state against the very graphic that believed the state belonged
• 15:02
  exclusively to them.
• 15:03
  Speaker 2: Precisely, that is courageous.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: To the point of being genuinely dangerous.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: It was incredibly dangerous. She wasn't just asking for equality
• 15:10
  out on the streets. She was actively prosecuting the oppressors
• 15:13
  within the confines of their own legal system. She was
• 15:16
  holding them accountable to the absolute letter of the law.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: And she wasn't just operating within the rigid confines of
• 15:21
  the courtroom either. Her legal career was totally intertwined with
• 15:24
  her on the ground grassroots activism.
• 15:26
  Speaker 2: Yes, she was very active locally.
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: She is attending protest marches in Louisville in August nineteen
• 15:33
  sixty three. She actually travels to the historic March on.
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: Washington, a monumental event.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: But she doesn't just come back feeling inspired and giving speeches.
• 15:43
  You know, she comes back and builds real political infrastructure.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: She was a builder for sure.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: She found the Independent Voters Association the IVA, and her
• 15:51
  approach to voter registration is one of the most mechanically
• 15:55
  brilliant things I've ever heard.
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: It really is unique.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: She didn't just walk around with clipboards telling people to register.
• 16:00
  She actually rented mechanical voting machines and put them right there.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: In her law, of which seems crazy today.
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: Yeah, why physically rent a massive machine? I mean what
• 16:11
  was the point of that.
• 16:12
  Speaker 2: To answer that, we really have to look at the
• 16:14
  sensory experience of voting in the nineteen sixties. Today we
• 16:18
  just fill in a bubble with a pen or tap a.
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: Touch screen, right, Yeah, it's super quiet and simple.
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: But in the nineteen sixties, voting was done on these massive,
• 16:27
  heavy mechanical lever machines. You walked into a booth, you
• 16:31
  pulled a giant lever that closed a curtain behind you
• 16:33
  with a loud, metallic crash, and then you were faced
• 16:36
  with rows and rows of small metal switches.
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: Which sounds incredibly intimidating even if you are used to it. Honestly.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: Right now, imagine you are a black citizen in a
• 16:47
  marginalized community who has been legally and socially barred from
• 16:51
  participating in this process your entire life.
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, I'm picturing it.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: You finally get the courage to register. You go to
• 16:58
  a polling place which is likely staff entirely by white
• 17:01
  poll workers who actively do not want you there. Right,
• 17:04
  They're glaring at you exactly. You step into this metal box,
• 17:08
  the curtain crash is shut, and you have absolutely no
• 17:10
  idea how the machine actually works. If you ask for help,
• 17:13
  you risk humiliation or even worse, having your ballot completely invalidated.
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: Wow. So the physical machine itself was a barrier of intimidation.
• 17:22
  Speaker 2: It was a massive psychological barrier.
• 17:23
  Speaker 1: Aw So by bringing the machine into her office, she
• 17:26
  is creating a safe sandbox for them to learn.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: Precisely, she completely demystified the physical mechanics of democracy. She
• 17:34
  brought the machine into a comfortable, safe environment, probably poured
• 17:38
  some coffee, and just said, here is how you physically
• 17:41
  pull the levers.
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: That is so smart.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: But more importantly, once she removed the intimidation of the
• 17:46
  machine itself, she taught them conceptually how to vote.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: And this is where she really starts disrupting the local
• 17:53
  power dynamics. She was explicitly teaching people to vote for
• 17:57
  the issue and for this specific candidate that's ported the issue,
• 18:01
  rather than just falling in line with street ticket party loyalty.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: Yes, she focused heavily on nonpartisan, transactional political power.
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: But wouldn't the local Democratic or Republican parties want a
• 18:13
  dynamic organizer like her on their side? I mean, why
• 18:17
  remain fiercely independent.
• 18:18
  Speaker 2: Because a partisan activist is predictable and therefore they are controllable.
• 18:23
  I see, if you are a local ward boss or
• 18:25
  a party chairman, you know exactly how to deal with
• 18:28
  a loyal Democrat or a loyal Republican. You offer them
• 18:30
  a little patronage, You make a few compromises, and you
• 18:33
  basically co opt their.
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: Movement right, you buy them off es actually.
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: Exactly, but an independent block of highly educated, issue focused
• 18:41
  voters that is a massive wild card. It shifts the
• 18:45
  entire balance of power. Alberta Jones essentially told the political establishment,
• 18:50
  we don't belong to you. You have to earn these
• 18:52
  votes every single election by delivering on civil rights.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: And she proved it wasn't just a theory either. She
• 18:59
  successfully read stirred approximately six thousand black voters.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: Which is an incredible number for a local organizer.
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: In a local municipal election. Six thousand unified independent swing
• 19:09
  votes is a political earthquake.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: It really is.
• 19:12
  Speaker 1: In fact, her efforts with the IVA directly contributed to
• 19:16
  a massive political upset in nineteen sixty one. Those six
• 19:19
  thousand votes resulted in completely ousting the incumbent mayor and
• 19:23
  the existing board of aldermen.
• 19:24
  Speaker 2: She literally flipped the city's leadership.
• 19:27
  Speaker 1: And the newly elected leadership, knowing exactly who put them
• 19:30
  in office, then paved the way for the South's first
• 19:32
  public Accommodations Ordnance in nineteen sixty three, which successfully desegregated
• 19:37
  businesses in Louisville.
• 19:38
  Speaker 2: Think about the sheer magnitude of that for a second.
• 19:41
  She proved that she could not only participate in this system,
• 19:45
  she could completely decapitate its leadership at the ballot box
• 19:48
  and install politicians who would change the law.
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: It's just wild. Yeah, And despite operating at this really
• 19:53
  high level of political strategy, she was still deeply embedded
• 19:57
  in the everyday, micro level lives of the people in
• 20:00
  her community.
• 20:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, she never lost touch with her roots.
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: It wasn't all just high level politics and sports contracts.
• 20:06
  There is this story about her fundraising for a young
• 20:09
  local man named James Bulky welch Oh, I.
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: Know the story. It's so touching, right.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: He had tragically lost his arms saving his dog from
• 20:17
  an oncoming train, and Alberta Jones didn't just send a
• 20:21
  sympathy card. She stepped up, organized a local auction, leveraged
• 20:25
  all her political connections, and helped secure the funds to
• 20:28
  get in prosthetic arms.
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: She was just constantly doing the work.
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: The Alberta Jones Project describes her as feminine excellence in
• 20:34
  black skin. She was challenging the status quo from the
• 20:37
  highest court rooms down to the most immediate local neighborhood needs.
• 20:41
  Speaker 2: Which perfectly and really tragically sets the stage for why
• 20:45
  the backlash against her was so severe. When you register
• 20:48
  six thousand independent voters, you don't just win an election,
• 20:51
  You violently displace the people who used to hold that power.
• 20:54
  Speaker 1: And they don't like that, No, they don't.
• 20:56
  Speaker 2: And in nineteen sixty five, displace power usually retaliated with
• 21:00
  stream violence. The civil rights movement is gaining massive momentum
• 21:03
  locally with sit ins and economic boycotts. Kentucky may have
• 21:08
  avoided the church bombings of Birmingham, but the threats were
• 21:10
  incredibly real.
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: Cross burnings and economic reprisals were standard tools used against activists.
• 21:15
  Speaker 2: She entered operating procedure for white supremacists. And here is
• 21:19
  Alberta Jones.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: A highly visible, highly effective black woman who is systematically
• 21:25
  dismantling the white political establishment's monopoly on power. She's prosecuting
• 21:30
  abuse of white men, She's blocking the mob from exploiting athletes.
• 21:34
  Speaker 2: She was just a massive target exactly the Federal Voting
• 21:37
  Rights Act is looming, threatening to make her local efforts
• 21:41
  a permanent national standard. She was a walking, breathing, highly
• 21:45
  effective symbol of a changing world that a dangerous faction
• 21:49
  of society wanted to stop at absolutely all costs.
• 21:52
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the phone call she received on
• 21:55
  the night of August fourth, nineteen sixty five. This is
• 21:58
  where the narrative shifts from a triumphant biography to a chilling,
• 22:02
  agonizing timeline. It's a very dark turn because her success
• 22:05
  had set a stage and someone within the shadows of
• 22:08
  that city decided to retaliate. Let's walk through the mechanics
• 22:12
  of that night. Okay, it's the evening of August fourth.
• 22:15
  She is at home with her family, The heat is oppressive,
• 22:17
  and around eleven PM or shortly after, the phone rings.
• 22:21
  Speaker 2: Wait for a phone call very late.
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: The reports identify the caller as a friend named Gladys
• 22:25
  Weikoff or someone using a very similar name, who says
• 22:28
  she urgently needs to discuss a lawsuit. Now. Alberta was
• 22:31
  understandably reluctant to go it's late, but her sense of
• 22:34
  duty as an attorney wins out.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: She always put the work first, he did.
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: She leaves the house to meet this caller, and she
• 22:40
  never returns.
• 22:41
  Speaker 2: It is the next morning, August fifth, that the true
• 22:44
  horror of that phone call becomes apparent. Her mother and
• 22:48
  her sister Flora realize her bed hasn't been slept in,
• 22:51
  and they report her missing. Then, at approximately ten thirty
• 22:54
  in the morning, two young boys are playing near the river.
• 22:58
  Oh maam, yeah, they spot a body. It's floating in
• 23:02
  the Ohio River south of the Sherman Minton Bridge near
• 23:05
  fontaine Ferry Park.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: So tragic.
• 23:08
  Speaker 2: Initially, some responding authorities tried to suggest it was an
• 23:11
  accidental drowning, but the physical investigation very rapidly revealed a
• 23:15
  staggering level of foul play.
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: I mean, the crime scene itself is so messy. It's
• 23:20
  just so loud, it really is. They find her rendered
• 23:23
  Ford Fairlane abandoned nearby. The keys are completely missing. Yeah,
• 23:27
  but inside the car, the physical evidence tells of this
• 23:30
  horrifying story of a desperate struggle.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: It's the very gruesome scene.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: There are massive bloodstains on the seats and the floorboards.
• 23:36
  They find fragments of a brick, they find hair, and
• 23:40
  perhaps most chillingly, they find her upper dentures just left
• 23:43
  behind in the car.
• 23:45
  Speaker 2: The physical evidence inside that confined space of the Ford
• 23:48
  Fairlane speaks to an overwhelming, brutal close quarters attack.
• 23:53
  Speaker 1: It had to be terrifying.
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: The autopsy completely confirmed the narrative of the car interior
• 23:59
  had been severely beaten about the head with a blunt object,
• 24:03
  which the brick fragments strongly corroborate.
• 24:06
  Speaker 1: Right because shattering a brick takes a lot of.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: Force, exactly the sheer force required to shatter a brick
• 24:11
  during a beating indicates a terrifying level of violence. She
• 24:15
  was beaten so brutally that she was rendered completely unconscious.
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: But she didn't die from the beating.
• 24:20
  Speaker 2: No, she didn't. The autopsy revealed water in her lungs.
• 24:24
  This means that while she was still alive but incapacitated,
• 24:27
  her attackers threw her into the river, where she drowned.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: It's just monstrous.
• 24:32
  Speaker 2: It gets worse. Witnesses eventually came forward describing a terrifying
• 24:35
  scene from the night before. They reported seeing two or
• 24:38
  three men forcing a screaming woman who matched Alberta's description
• 24:42
  into a car matching the rented fair Lane.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: Wow in public.
• 24:46
  Speaker 2: Later witnesses reported seeing a body being physically heaved from
• 24:49
  the Sherman Minton Bridge.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: I am stuck on the sheer audacity this crime. You
• 24:55
  have a woman screaming in public, you have multiple men
• 24:58
  coordinating an abduction, you have al blood soak car abandoned
• 25:01
  in a public area, and you have a body thrown
• 25:04
  off a major bridge over a massive river.
• 25:06
  Speaker 2: It's practically theatrical.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: It feels like they wanted this to be found. It
• 25:10
  feels like they wanted the community to see the horror
• 25:12
  of what they did to her.
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: You are identifying the psychological core of the crime, the
• 25:16
  calculated mechanics of this murder, the use of a decoy
• 25:19
  phone call to lure a protective attorney out of her home,
• 25:23
  the overwhelming multi person physical violence, the public disposal of
• 25:27
  the body. This was not a simple.
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: Crime of passion, and it clearly was an a random mugging.
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: Definitely not. The brutality and the high visibility of the
• 25:35
  disposal were explicitly designed to send a message. When you
• 25:39
  brutalize a prominent community leader and leave the evidence of
• 25:42
  that brutality so bare, it is an act of political terrorism.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: Scare everyone else exactly.
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: It is designed to induce paralyzing fear in the six
• 25:52
  thousand voters she just registered. It is meant to silence
• 25:55
  the community she empowered by showing them exactly what happens
• 25:58
  to those who challenged this system.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: And the timeline of the evidence gets even more bizarre
• 26:03
  because her purse is missing from the car and it's
• 26:06
  not on her body when she is pulled.
• 26:07
  Speaker 2: From the river, right, it's just gone, but.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: It doesn't stay missing. Three years later, in nineteen sixty eight,
• 26:13
  her purse mysteriously appears literally hanging from the Sherman Minton Bridge.
• 26:19
  Three years later.
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: It's one of the most baffling parts of the case.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: I am completely hung up on this purse. Are you
• 26:25
  telling me that no bridge inspector, no maintenance worker, no
• 26:28
  pedestrian walk that bridge for three years and noticed a
• 26:32
  purse hanging there?
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: It's highly improbable.
• 26:34
  Speaker 1: Is that sheer unimaginable investigative incompetence or does that point
• 26:38
  to someone actively taunting the police and tampering with evidence.
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: The idea that it hung there for three years unnoticed
• 26:44
  is practically impossible. Consider the environment the Ohio River Valley
• 26:48
  experience is severe weather blistering summers, freezing winters, massive thunderstorms.
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: Right the elements would destroy it exactly.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: A leather or fabric purse hanging exposed on a steel
• 26:59
  bridge would physically degrade, wrought, or be blown away over
• 27:02
  thirty six months. Bridges are also highly trafficked, the routinely
• 27:07
  inspected for structural integrity, and they're.
• 27:09
  Speaker 1: Painted, so someone had to have put it there recently.
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: A purse does not hang unnoticed and unweathered for three years.
• 27:16
  Its sudden appearance in nineteen sixty eight strongly suggests it
• 27:19
  was kept by the killers as a trophy or perhaps
• 27:22
  as leverage. Then it was deliberately placed there. That is
• 27:26
  so creepy that introduces a deeply sinister element of staging.
• 27:30
  It was likely done to taunt the authorities, to retraumatize
• 27:33
  the family, or perhaps to deliberately misdirect a renewed investigation
• 27:38
  by suddenly introducing new evidence out of nowhere.
• 27:41
  Speaker 1: Which brings us to the agonizing decades of dead ends
• 27:44
  that followed. Because after a crime this brutal targeting, as
• 27:48
  sitting city prosecutor, you would expect the justice system to
• 27:51
  turn the city upside down.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: You would certainly think so and.
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: Initially the historical record shows they made a show of
• 27:58
  trying chief at the time, will you meet Binner? Increased
• 28:02
  patrols in the West End right detectives interviewed somewhere between
• 28:05
  three hundred and four hundred people. They collected physical evidence,
• 28:09
  including lifting latent fingerprints from the bloodstained interior of the car,
• 28:13
  and they send them to the FBI.
• 28:14
  Speaker 2: They did the initial legwork, but then the.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Progress just stalls out entirely. It becomes one of six
• 28:22
  unsolved murders in the Louisville area that year. How does
• 28:25
  the murder of a prosecutor just go cold like that?
• 28:28
  Speaker 2: It goes cold through a phenomenon we often see in
• 28:31
  civil rights era cases, investigative apathy, investigated apathy. Yeah, you
• 28:36
  have a flurry of initial activity to satisfy the press
• 28:39
  and the public, but when those initial leads don't yield
• 28:42
  a quick arrest, the systemic will to solve the case
• 28:45
  just evaporates.
• 28:46
  Speaker 1: You just give up.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: The detectives move on, the files get boxed up. For decades,
• 28:50
  the case basically languished in evidence lockers. It wasn't until
• 28:54
  two thousand and eight, forty three years later, that there
• 28:56
  was a massive technological.
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: Breakthrough because of the fingerprints right.
• 29:00
  Speaker 2: Exactly, the FBI, utilizing AFIS, the Automated Fingerprint Identification System
• 29:07
  ran the latent prints collected from the car in nineteen
• 29:10
  sixty five against modern databases.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: Explain how a print from a crime scene in nineteen
• 29:15
  sixty five suddenly pings a computer in two thousand and eight.
• 29:19
  How does that physical evidence actually survive that long? Well?
• 29:22
  Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty five, detectives would dust a surface with
• 29:25
  powder to make the oils of a fingerprint visible, then
• 29:28
  use an adhesive tape to lift the print, placing it
• 29:31
  on a small physical.
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: Card, right like you see in old movies.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Exactly, those cards just sit in files, But in the
• 29:37
  modern era, those physical cards are scanned and digitized into as.
• 29:41
  AFIS uses complex algorithms to map the minutia of the fingerprint,
• 29:45
  where ridges n where they fork, things like that. Oh,
• 29:47
  that makes sense, and then it compares that map against
• 29:50
  millions of digitized prints of individuals who have been arrested
• 29:52
  finger printed for government jobs, were served in the military
• 29:55
  in the decades since. In two thousand and eight, the
• 29:58
  computer found a match a latent fingerprint from the violent
• 30:01
  interior of Alberta. Jones's rented car matched a man named
• 30:05
  Arthur Porter, the third At the time of the murder
• 30:08
  in nineteen sixty five, Porter would have been just seventeen
• 30:11
  years old.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: Okay, so they have a scientific fingerprint match putting a
• 30:16
  specific person inside the car where a brutal struggle took place.
• 30:20
  They track him down. Record show he was living in
• 30:22
  California at.
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: This point, Yes, he had moved out West.
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: Investigators interview him. He denies any involvement, claiming he had
• 30:29
  no idea how his print got there, and he reportedly
• 30:32
  fails a polygraph.
• 30:33
  Speaker 2: Test, which is pretty damning contextually.
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: And yet around twenty ten, the prosecutors look at this
• 30:40
  file and decline to press charges. They cite insufficient evidence.
• 30:44
  And this is the part that makes absolutely no sense
• 30:46
  to me.
• 30:46
  Speaker 2: The witness issue.
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: Yes, in their reasoning they claimed that key witnesses from
• 30:49
  nineteen sixty five were deceased, but later investigations revealed some
• 30:53
  of those witnesses were actually still alive. How does a
• 30:56
  prosecutor's office mistakenly declare vital witnesses dead adding competence? Where's
• 31:01
  that malice?
• 31:02
  Speaker 2: It is the ultimate symptom of systemic decay. When dealing
• 31:05
  with historical cold cases, finding witnesses from forty five years
• 31:09
  prior requires rigorous, exhaustive skip tracing and genealogical research. It's
• 31:14
  hard work, very hard when a prosecutor's office lacks the funding,
• 31:18
  the personnel, or frankly, the institutional desire to prosecute a complex,
• 31:23
  half century old case. Checking a box that says witness
• 31:27
  deceased is a very easy way to close the file.
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: That is just infuriating.
• 31:32
  Speaker 2: Furthermore, when the case was eventually reopened under the Emmett
• 31:35
  Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act, the systemic rot became
• 31:39
  even more apparent.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Let's actually define that act because it sounds powerful, but
• 31:43
  how does it actually function in a case like this?
• 31:45
  Speaker 2: The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act allows the
• 31:48
  Department of Justice to reopen pre nineteen eighty cold cases
• 31:52
  that involve civil rights violations resulting in death.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: Okay, sounds good in theory.
• 31:56
  Speaker 2: It does. However, it has severe jurisdictional limitations. The federal
• 32:01
  government cannot generally prosecute a state level murder charge unless
• 32:05
  it occurred on federal land or involved a specific federal
• 32:09
  civil rights statute. That existed at the time, and crucially
• 32:12
  wasn't bound by a five year statute of limitations, which
• 32:15
  a lot of them were exactly many older federal laws
• 32:19
  were bound by that. The DOJ's Civil Rights Division investigated Alberta.
• 32:23
  Jones's case until as recently as twenty twenty three.
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: That recently yes.
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: In their closing memo, they detailed extensive efforts, but ultimately
• 32:31
  concluded they lacked the legal jurisdiction and the untainted evidence
• 32:35
  required for a federal prosecution.
• 32:37
  Speaker 1: Untainted evidence, that's the key phrase.
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: They noted massive issues. Physical evidence had been hopelessly corrupted.
• 32:43
  Some of the original fingerprint cards from nineteen sixty five
• 32:46
  had reportedly just vanished from the police evidence lockers.
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: Unbelievable.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: They found contradictory statements from witnesses who were interviewed decades apart.
• 32:54
  The looming specter of the original nineteen sixty five police
• 32:57
  work being either deeply biased or profoundly in competent, made
• 33:00
  building a prosecutable case in twenty twenty three virtually impossible.
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: You have missing fingerprint cards, witnesses prematurely declared dead, a
• 33:09
  purse that magically appears three years later, and federal prosecutors
• 33:13
  basically throwing their hands up.
• 33:15
  Speaker 2: It's a complete failure of the system.
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: It forces us to look at the shadows. Because the
• 33:19
  official legal investigations have ended in closed memos and insufficient evidence.
• 33:25
  We have to examine the theories ourselves.
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: We do. We have to look at the possibilities.
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: We have to look at the attempts to answer the
• 33:31
  agonizing question why was Alberta Jones killed? And who ordered it?
• 33:36
  Speaker 2: There are four leading theories that attempt to explain the motive,
• 33:39
  and we must examine them impartially analyzing the mechanics of each,
• 33:43
  because each points to a different facet of the incredibly
• 33:46
  dangerous life she led.
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: Okay, what is the first one?
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: The first and historically most contextual theory is that this
• 33:53
  was a coordinated civil rights assassination. Under this theory, Alberta
• 33:57
  Jones was targeted by white supremacists, perhaps affiliated with the
• 34:01
  white Citizens Councils or rogue elements of the entrenched political establishment.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: People who are terrified of black political power.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: Exactly. The timing is the most compelling piece of circumstantial
• 34:13
  evidence here. She has murdered mere hours before the Voting
• 34:16
  Rights Act, as.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: Sign the timing is just too perfect.
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: She had just registered six thousand voters and orchestrated the
• 34:23
  ousting of the mayor. She was an existential mathematical threat
• 34:27
  to the white supremacist status quo in Louisville.
• 34:29
  Speaker 1: It aligns perfectly with the political terrorism of the era.
• 34:33
  But then there's the second theory which often gets floated
• 34:36
  in police reports, the robbery.
• 34:38
  Speaker 2: Gone wrong right the robbery theory.
• 34:40
  Speaker 1: This is suggested because her car was initially taken, the
• 34:43
  keys were missing, and her purse was gone. But looking
• 34:46
  at the mechanics of the crime scene, this just doesn't
• 34:49
  hold water for me at all.
• 34:50
  Speaker 2: I agree completely.
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: Let's be real. You don't drag a woman out of
• 34:53
  her home, beat her unconscious with a brick, coordinate multiple
• 34:57
  men to load her into a car, drive her to
• 34:59
  a hig highly visible bridge, and heave her body into
• 35:02
  a river just to steal a purse.
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: The effort to pay off ratio completely debunks the simple robbery.
• 35:08
  Thieves generally want to minimize time in a crime scene.
• 35:11
  They want cash, and they want to flee exactly.
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: They don't want a massive spectacle.
• 35:15
  Speaker 2: They do not orchestrate a complex abduction, utilize overwhelming lethal force,
• 35:20
  and execute a public dumping of the body. The physical
• 35:24
  disposal of the body is a massive, unnecessary risk for
• 35:28
  a mugger.
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: So what's the third theory.
• 35:30
  Speaker 2: That leads us to personal or professional enemies. We must
• 35:35
  remember her day job. She was a prosecutor in domestic
• 35:38
  relations court.
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: Right. She was sending abusers to jail.
• 35:41
  Speaker 2: She was actively utilizing the state to punish men for
• 35:44
  domestic violence. She was ruining the lives of abusers. There
• 35:47
  were also persistent whispers of possible connections to organized crime,
• 35:52
  pushback through her legal work or jealousy from corrupt colleagues.
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: A jailhouse informant years later actually claimed the murder was
• 36:00
  paid contract hit.
• 36:01
  Speaker 2: A contract tilling would certainly explain the multiple men, the
• 36:04
  coordinated decoy phone call luring her out, and the theatrical
• 36:08
  disposal of the body.
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: And there's also a sub theory that occasionally pops up
• 36:11
  with this one, tying her to the Nation of Islam
• 36:14
  or the boxing underworld, specifically because of her foundational work
• 36:17
  with Cassius.
• 36:18
  Speaker 2: Clay Right the boxing connection.
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: We already discussed how deeply corrupt and mob tied the
• 36:23
  boxing world was. If you lock up fifteen percent of
• 36:26
  a future heavyweight champion's money. You are taking money out
• 36:30
  of the pockets of very dangerous men.
• 36:32
  Speaker 2: It is a plausible motive on paper. However, historical researchers,
• 36:36
  her family, and the available evidence largely dismissed this specific angle.
• 36:41
  Why is that because by nineteen sixty five, Muhammad Ali
• 36:44
  had moved on to different management structures associated with the
• 36:47
  Nation of Islam, and Alberta Jones was deeply focused on
• 36:51
  her prosecutorial and local political work.
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: Ah, so they'd kind of drifted into different spheres.
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: Yes, the boxing theory seems more speculative, biproduct of her
• 37:00
  proximity to a massive global figure, rather than rooted in
• 37:04
  hard connective evidence to the events of August.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: Fourth, which brings us to the fourth and final theory,
• 37:09
  a police or official cover up. This isn't necessarily a
• 37:12
  theory of why she was killed, but rather a mechanical
• 37:15
  explanation of how the killers entirely escaped.
• 37:18
  Speaker 2: Justice right the mechanism of the failure.
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: This theory is heavily supported by the staggering chain of errors,
• 37:24
  the missing fingerprint cards, the bizarre delayed staging of the
• 37:28
  purse on the bridge, the failure to track witnesses, the
• 37:32
  premature declaration of witness deaths.
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: Whether local law enforcement in nineteen sixty five was directly
• 37:37
  involved in executing her murder or whether they simply realized
• 37:41
  who did it and decided to look the other way
• 37:43
  to protect the political establishment, the mechanical outcome is identical.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: The justice system she dedicated her life to perfecting ultimately
• 37:50
  failed her completely.
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: It really did. When you analyze these theories, you realize
• 37:55
  the tragic reality. A black female prosecutor operating in multiple
• 37:59
  high stakes arenas naturally accumulates powerful, dangerous adversaries on every side.
• 38:04
  Speaker 1: She was disrupting political machines, prosecuting domestic abusers, outsmarting sports syndicates,
• 38:10
  and advancing civil rights all at once.
• 38:12
  Speaker 2: She was fighting battles in so many fronts.
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: We have a woman who is a systemic threat to
• 38:16
  the racist political establishment, a direct threat to abusive men
• 38:20
  in her community, and a financial threat to anyone who
• 38:23
  wanted to exploit a future athlete. It feels less like
• 38:27
  a mystery of if someone wanted to harm her and
• 38:30
  more a deeply tragic mystery of who got to her.
• 38:32
  Speaker 2: First, Because any one of those fronts had the motive,
• 38:36
  the means, and the viciousness to strike back.
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: It's just devastating.
• 38:40
  Speaker 2: It is a devastating reality to confront. But we must
• 38:43
  ensure that the brutality of her end does not eclipse
• 38:46
  the sheer magnitude of her life. And this brings us
• 38:49
  to the permanence of her legacy.
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: Yes, let's talk about her legacy.
• 38:52
  Speaker 2: Despite the fact that the legal system has closed the
• 38:54
  books and her murder remains officially unsolved, Alberta Jones's impact
• 38:58
  has proven to be incredible, resilient against erasure.
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: Her name actually graces parks in Louisville, now right.
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: It does. There are legal and civic awards dedicated to
• 39:07
  her memory, and in twenty twenty six, a statue of
• 39:10
  her is scheduled to be unveiled in the Kentucky State Capitol,
• 39:13
  permanently cementing her face and her story into the official
• 39:17
  historical narrative of the state.
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: It's amazing, and the.
• 39:20
  Speaker 2: Alberta Junes Project continues to meticulously document her life, ensuring
• 39:25
  her story isn't relegated to a true crime footnote, but
• 39:28
  is taught as a masterclass in civic engagement and legal brilliance.
• 39:32
  Speaker 1: Her model of nonpartisan, highly practical civic education is so
• 39:37
  desperately relevant right now. I want you listening right now
• 39:40
  to really think about your own spheres of influence.
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: It's an important reflection.
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: It is easy to post an opinion or attend a rally.
• 39:47
  Alberta Jones didn't just march, though she did do that.
• 39:50
  She went back to her office and did the unglamorous,
• 39:53
  highly technical work.
• 39:54
  Speaker 2: She learned the language of accounting.
• 39:56
  Speaker 1: She drafted the ironclad legal trusts. She physically ran to
• 40:00
  the voting machines and patiently taught her neighbors how the
• 40:03
  gears and levers worked. She did the quiet, structural work
• 40:07
  of actually building durable power for marginalized people.
• 40:10
  Speaker 2: And that is a legacy that cannot be thrown off
• 40:12
  a bridge. It cannot be drowned in the Ohio River.
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: No, it can't.
• 40:15
  Speaker 2: The people who orchestrated the murder of Alberta Jones intended
• 40:19
  to erase her, to silence her influence, and to terrify
• 40:22
  her community into submission. But consider this. By committing such
• 40:26
  a brutal, cowardly act to stop her, they inadvertently guaranteed
• 40:30
  that history would eventually come looking for her. Wow, what
• 40:33
  if the very violence meant to destroy a trailblazer is
• 40:35
  precisely what immortalizes their unfinished work, forcing future generations like
• 40:40
  you listening right now, to pick up the baton and
• 40:42
  finish the job.