President-elect Donald Trump’s intention to nominate Republican Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III to be the attorney general of the United States has set off alarm bells throughout the civil rights community, which notes the accusations of racism that have hovered around the Alabama lawmaker like an unshakeable cloud of flies for many decades.
In this Nov. 17, 2016, photo, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. speaks to media at Trump Tower in New York. As a senator, Sessions became Congress’ leading advocate not only for a crackdown on illegal immigration, but for slowing all immigration, along with mass deportations and stricter scrutiny of those entering the U.S. As attorney general, he’d be well positioned to turn those ideas into reality. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
“If you have nostalgia for the days when Blacks kept quiet, gays were in the closet, immigrants were invisible and women stayed in the kitchen, Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions is your man,” said Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) in a statement. He added, “No Senator has fought harder against the hopes and aspirations of Latinos, immigrants, and people of color than Sen. Sessions…. He is the kind of person who will set back law enforcement, civil rights, the courts, and increase America’s mass incarceration industry and erase 50 years of progress.”
The rumbles about Session’s alleged bigotry began while he worked as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and prosecuted three Black activists—including Albert Turner, a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr.—on allegations of voter fraud in Perry County. Civil rights groups accused him of a witch hunt to find voting violations in the Black community while overlooking potential voter fraud among White voters. They also accused him of using the trial as a means of suppressing Black votes as part of a conspiracy to re-elect his friend Sen. Jeremiah Denton. The Black activists, known as the “Marion Three” were acquitted by a jury after four hours of deliberation.
The Perry County case would take center stage the next year after President Ronald Reagan nominated Sessions for the bench in the U.S. District Court in Alabama and he faced down the Senate Judiciary Committee—which included Denton—during a confirmation hearing.
The seemingly one-sided prosecution of Black voting rights activists was bad enough, but it was the further accusations lobbed against him during the hearing that made the taint of alleged bigotry on Sessions even stronger.
Veteran Justice Department employee J. Gerald Hebert offered some of the more damning testimony.
“The general impression I get when we talk about racial questions is that he is not a very sensitive person when it comes to race relations,” Herbert said in deposition.
He added that Sessions was wont to “pop off” on such matters, calling James Blacksher, a White civil rights lawyer, a “disgrace to his race” for defending Black clients in voting rights and similar cases.
Sessions also supposedly called the NAACP and the ACLU “un-American” and “Communist-inspired,” adding the groups “forced civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them.”
During his testimony, Sessions seemingly verified what Herbert said, saying the ACLU and NAACP could be construed as “un-American” when “they involve themselves in promoting un-American positions” in foreign policy.
In other damaging testimony Thomas Figures, a Black former assistant U.S. attorney who worked under Sessions for four years, recalled another instance of the nominee’s casual racial insensitivity. Figures recalled that in 1981, Sessions was talking with him and Department of Justice prosecutor Barry Kowalski about a case involving the lynching of a Black man by two Ku Klux Klan members. On hearing that the assailants had smoked marijuana on the day of the murder, Sessions remarked aloud that he thought the KKK was “OK until I found out they smoked pot.”
Sessions insisted it was a “silly comment” intended as a “joke,” but several senators questioned his levity in the face of such a brutal slaying.
Figures, too, did not find Session’s skewed “humor” to be funny. He testified his former boss often referred to him as “boy” and warned him to “be careful what you say to White folks” when he chastised a White secretary.
In his defense, Sessions insisted that while he may have been injudicious in his statements he was not racist—he had roomed several times with a Black colleague, his children attended an integrated school, and he himself had taught at a majority-Black school.
Ultimately, however, the Republican-controlled committee voted 10-8 against Sessions’ confirmation, with Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Ted Kennedy saying, “Mr. Sessions is a throwback to a shameful era which I know both Black and White Americans thought was in our past. It is inconceivable to me that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a U.S. attorney, let alone a U.S. federal judge.”
Despite that indictment, Sessions was elected as Alabama’s attorney general in 1994. While in office, he conducted another voter fraud probe that again targeted the Black community, detractors said. And, they added, he showed less enthusiasm for investigating the burnings of Black churches across the state, according to The New Republic.
More disturbing, civil rights groups say, has been Sessions’ voting record in Congress, for which he has consistently gotten an “F” rating from the NAACP.
On voting rights, for example, Sessions admitted to calling the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a “piece of intrusive legislation.” And while he voted for its renewal in 2006, he has stymied efforts to update and restore the Act after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision, Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder struck down key provisions of the law.
Opponents said Sessions’ bigotry has truly shown itself in judicial nominations. As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Sessions has criticized judicial nominees with civil rights backgrounds for having the “ACLU gene.” In 2011, for example, he criticized Obama appointee for the Northern District of California Judge Ed Chen, who has been a staff attorney at the ACLU representing individuals in discrimination and civil rights matters. And, he voted against Loretta Lynch’s nomination on her way to becoming the first African-American woman to serve as U.S. attorney general.
Similarly, in 2010, Sessions ranted on the Senate floor about Obama’s judicial appointments having the “ACLU DNA” and “ACLU Chromosome.”
