The brutal 1965 murder remains unsolved as the city prepares to unfurl a huge banner in her honor Monday.
The prosecutor was pulled out of her rental car, beaten in the head with a brick until she lost consciousness and thrown into the Ohio River, where she drowned.
The brutal Aug. 5, 1965, murder of Alberta O. Jones, a civil rights activist and the first black woman to become a prosecutor in Louisville, was never solved, despite fingerprints obtained from her car and witnesses who saw men tossing a body from a bridge.
“Because things were still so segregated in Louisville then, I believe, if she had been a white woman prosecutor, they would have turned over heaven and hell to solve this,” said Jones’s sister Flora Shanklin, 81, who still lives in Louisville. “But she was black. They didn’t do anything about it.”
Shanklin doesn’t want people to forget about Jones, a trailblazer who integrated the University of Louisville and worked as the first attorney for Muhammad Ali, who was then Cassius Clay, negotiating the contract for his first fight.
On Monday, a Hometown Heroes banner honoring Jones will be unfurled in downtown Louisville, where she will join Ali; actress Jennifer Lawrence; and television anchor Diane Sawyer, among others.
Last year, Shanklin and Lee Remington, a professor at Bellarmine University, raised $8,000 to create the banner for Jones, which will hang from the side of the River City Bank building.
Remington has been intrigued by Alberta Jones since 2001, when she was a first-year law student at Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville.
“In a hallway, they had portraits of Kentucky civil rights leaders,” Remington recalled. “She was the only African American woman on the wall. I stopped to read the inscription. It talked about her work with civil rights. At the bottom, it said she was murdered, and it was unsolved.”
[Unsolved and overlooked murders: Investigating cold cases of the civil rights era]
Remington was incredulous that the slaying of a prosecutor would go unsolved after so many years. The image of Jones and the caption would stay with her for more than 10 years, through law [more…]
Source: Who killed Alberta Jones, Louisville’s first black female prosecutor? – The Washington Post
