Also important to that redemption narrative is the South’s belated prosecution of civil rights era crimes, and one of its major protagonists is Doug Jones, Mr. Moore’s Democratic opponent for the Dec. 12 special election. As the United States attorney for North Alabama under Bill Clinton, Mr. Jones brought murder charges against the last two living suspects in Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, which killed four black girls in 1963. (I have been friends with Mr. Jones since covering the two trials, in 2001 and 2002, at which the two defendants were convicted.)

While his appeal to black voters is self-evident, Mr. Jones is also culturally correct by Southern-white standards, a deer-hunting, bourbon-drinking, “Roll, Tide!” product of a Wallace-supporting household in Birmingham’s steel-mill suburbs, who did well as he did good. He is inarguably less “embarrassing” than Mr. Moore to the polite circles frequented by Mr. Strange, whose sister-in-law, Murray Johnston, a vocally anti-Trump quilt artist with whom I grew up in Birmingham, is working enthusiastically to elect Mr. Jones.