Mr. Jones was raised in a George Wallace-supporting family in Fairfield, Ala., a suburb of Birmingham built as a company town by U.S. Steel and named for the Connecticut village that a company executive called home. Like pretty much every other breadwinner in Fairfield, Mr. Jones’s father worked in the steel mill, eventually rising to a management post.

His youth coincided with the height of the civil rights movement, just outside the city that was its crucible. Mr. Jones was a teenager when the first black students arrived at the town’s newly integrated schools. Darnell Gardner, who is black and attended Fairfield High in those years, said some whites taunted and bullied the new students, while more gave them the silent treatment — but Mr. Jones was not like that.

A rally in Birmingham, Ala., on the eve of the election. Credit Bob Miller for The New York Times

“He kind of befriended me first,” Mr. Gardner said. “He was someone I could go to and say, ‘Hey Doug, I got this problem, can you help me?’”

Mr. Jones’s efforts to help smooth out the school integration process earned him a 1972 nod as the Kiwanis Club Youth of the Year, his name projected in light on the side of a Birmingham skyscraper.

After graduating from the University of Alabama, Mr. Jones went to the Cumberland Law School in Birmingham. There he would cut class to sit in the balcony of the Jefferson County courthouse and watch what he still calls the trial of the century: the prosecution of Robert Chambliss, a Klansman who helped plan the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young girls.

“It was great lawyering,” Mr. Jones said, and a valuable lesson for an aspiring trial lawyer. But he also knew: “This is Birmingham, this is history.”

Mr. Chambliss was the first man convicted in the bombing case. Bill Baxley, the state attorney general who led the prosecution, knew there were others involved. But with the passage of time and the challenging politics of such a case in Alabama, he feared that the others would never be tried.

Mr. Baxley said that at the time, he was not aware of the young law student obsessively watching the proceedings. “If I’d known he was going to be U.S. attorney, and that he would come in and pick up what I couldn’t finish,” Mr. Baxley said, “I would have rested much better for 25 years.”

After law school, Mr. Jones made a name in Birmingham legal circles and among the dwindling community of Alabama Democrats. He spent his first year working for Senator Heflin, a former State Supreme Court chief justice whom he still calls “Judge.” Next came several years as a federal prosecutor in Birmingham, followed by a long stretch as a defense attorney.

Bob Stropp, a lawyer who worked with Mr. Jones in the 1980s, said that even then, he was deeply involved in politics. Mr. Stropp recalled Mr. Jones attending party conventions and bringing baseballs with him for prominent figures to sign.

Mr. Jones in 2002, when he was the United States attorney in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing case. Credit Dave Martin/Associated Press

“He got Teddy Kennedy’s signature one time on a baseball,” Mr. Stropp said. “He was very savvy, politically.”

After Bill Clinton was re-elected in 1996, Mr. Jones achieved a long-held ambition when he was nominated and confirmed as United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama.

His first test was a serious one. An extremist, Eric Robert Rudolph, planted a bomb at an abortion clinic in Birmingham that exploded, killing one person and injuring another. Although Mr. Rudolph would not be apprehended until after Mr. Jones left office, the investigation revealed Mr. Jones to be a skilled political infighter. He resisted a proposal by the F.B.I. director to overhaul the structure of the bombing inquiry and won a compromise after weeks of negotiations.

But the challenge that obsessed him was one that he found out about just before taking office. One morning in 1997, while he was at home waiting for Congress to act on his appointment, he read in the paper that the F.B.I. had reopened the church bombing case.

“It was just chilling,” he said. He told his wife that morning, “Now I know why I’m going back to this office.”

Mr. Jones eventually brought charges against two men, Thomas Edwin Blanton Jr. and Bobby Frank Cherry. Acting as specially appointed state prosecutor, he won a murder conviction against Mr. Blanton just before he left office in 2001.

Immediately afterward, he decided to run for Mr. Heflin’s old seat, then occupied by Jeff Sessions. But money was tight, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 had changed the political climate, and he abandoned the campaign before the primary to return to private practice.

The case against Mr. Cherry slogged through the court system, and in early 2002, the Alabama state attorney general asked Mr. Jones to come back, again as a special state prosecutor, to try the case. He won a conviction in that case, too — but not before creating a souvenir that he still keeps at his law office.

While his team was discussing trial strategy, he used as an impromptu whiteboard a large poster that he found sitting in the office. Notes about the formation of the jury that would convict a Klansman terrorist cover the back of the poster. On the front is a plea to voters to elect Doug Jones to the Senate in 2002.

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