Where this was said
Alberta's Civil Rights Work Made Her a Target
At 34:45 · chapter starts 31:40
Far from being 'paranoid,' Alberta had documented, concrete reasons to fear for her safety. Her sister Flora was tailed by two white men showing police badges while driving Alberta's Thunderbird — they thought they were following Alberta. Someone repeated Alberta's private phone conversations back to her, confirming a tap. Declassified records show that US agencies including the CIA surveilled Martin Luther King Jr. during this same period, and Alberta was a significant figure in the same civil rights movement. The night she went to Gladys's, she was reportedly reading about the Kennedy assassination and said she hoped she wouldn't end up like him. After her death, the family learned she had just installed a burglar alarm on her car and purchased a gun.
In the months before her death, Alberta's car was deliberately scraped, her phone was tapped, and two white men showing police badges followed her sister while she was driving Alberta's distinctive Thunderbird. The government was actively surveilling civil rights leaders at this time.
Alberta O. Jones became the first Black woman prosecutor in Louisville, Kentucky's history, making her a trailblazer at the height of the civil rights movement.
Alberta co-founded the Independent Voters Association and helped register roughly 6,000 Black citizens to vote in Louisville.
Indiana experienced a resurgence of KKK activity in the 1960s, a fact Ashley Flowers noted in the context of the mysterious 51-mile odometer discrepancy and the purse being found on the Indiana side of the Sherman Minton Bridge.
Just two days after Alberta's murder, Detective Lancaster discovered that key fingerprint cards from her rental car had been thrown in a trash bin in the Louisville PD fingerprint lab. The most critical prints — from the left door window — were never recovered. Sergeant Miller, the last person with them, was never questioned.
