Let us all join the move to push Congress to reject Jeff Sessions. Over 1200 law professors from nearly 200 law schools wrote an open letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Sen. Jeff Sessions as U.S. Attorney General, citing among other things, Sessions’ career long racist actions. At the end of this piece, I will direct you to places to join this national effort. But first, some background.
Thirty years ago, President Ronald Reagan nominated Jeff Sessions to be a federal judge; however, a bipartisan majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected the nomination after they heard testimony about Sessions’ pattern of racist statements, his hostility toward civil rights groups, and his targeting of voting rights as a federal prosecutor in his home state of Alabama.
Let’s review his attacks on voting rights in Alabama. In 1985, when he was U.S. Attorney in Mobile, Sessions indicted black civic leaders on charges of voter fraud in several Black Belt counties, including Albert Turner, a long-time civil rights activist who advised Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and helped lead the voting rights March in Selma in 1965. Sessions and his fellow prosecutors alleged that Turner, his wife Evelyn, and activist Spencer Hogue altered ballots for a Sept. 1984 primary election. They were charged as a result of their assistance to elderly African Americans who could not get to the polls on their own and who needed help with the mechanics of using the absentee ballots, as many were illiterate. These elderly citizens were harassed by being interviewed late at night, accused of wrongdoing, and hauled by buses all the way to Mobile to be fingerprinted like criminals, presumably to frighten them into not bothering to vote in the future.
All of the defendants were eventually found innocent of the bogus charges, but not before local terrorists bombed or burned several black homes. The game plan was to frighten the citizens against voting, as the population in the Black Belt was predominantly black.
To publicize the outrageous activities in Alabama, led by Senator Jeremiah Denton and U.S. Attorney Jeff Sessions, a small group of us brought three of the Black Belt leaders to Boston to be interviewed by the media and to speak at colleges and universities. Later we sponsored buses for students and others to travel to Alabama to assist the elderly voters, to act as poll watchers and to provide moral support to black citizens as they voted. As one local woman, whose house had been burned said, “We’ll vote on!”—heroism in the face of the racist onslaught perpetrated by Sessions, and others.
Now President-elect Donald Trump, who has not kept his racism as closeted as Ronald Reagan, has nominated Senator Sessions to be the U. S. Attorney General, a position in which he would be responsible for enforcing civil rights laws throughout the country.
Well, has Jeff Sessions changed his ways since the 1980’s? Does he now deserve to be Attorney General? No. He could be opposed because he shares attributes similar to other Trump nominations—hostility toward the main work of the agencies they are to lead. But no, the current case against Sessions is much stronger than that.
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports the following:
- Since 2013 Sessions has given at least 18 interviews to Breitbart’s radio programs. (Breitbart is the media backbone of the white supremacist/white nationalist Alt-Right movement. Until the summer of 2016, Breitbart was headed by Steve Bannon, the racist, sexist, anti-Semitic manager of Trump’s campaign, who is the new chief White House strategist.)
- Senator Sessions’ communications director provided regular assistance to the Breitbart reporters, and organized “a weekly Friday happy hour for Sessions and Breitbart staffers.”
- Bannon gave Sessions credit for laying the groundwork for the “populist nationalist movement” that sustained Trump.
- Sessions has strong ties to anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim extremist groups.
The ACLU reports:
- Former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke praised Sessions’ nomination as one of the first steps in taking America back [from minorities and others who are not white and Christian].
- Voted against sentencing reform [when some laws were admittedly racially discriminatory]
- Sessions opposes measures to protect the rights of the LGBTQ community.
- He is for racial profiling [which has been found unconstitutional].
Further, Sessions wrote an article condemning the practice of federal investigations of police departments after police shootings of black men, such as was done in Chicago, Cleveland, and Ferguson.
Placing Sessions as Attorney General is like putting a fox in the hen house. We know what will happen.
Go to the following ACLU website to add your name to the list of individuals asking for a comprehensive review of Sessions’ record during the confirmation hearings next week:
Also, go to the following Moveon.org website to sign on to this statement to members of Congress:
“Members of Congress must reject the nomination of Jeff Sessions as attorney general. As a known racist with a long record of opposing civil rights and equality, it is unimaginable that he could be entrusted to serve as the nation’s top law enforcement official.”
http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/stop-jeff-sessions?source=s.em.mt&r_by=11614452
From the Interfaith Alliance: Contact your Senators today by calling the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.