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riversedge

(70,239 posts) Wed Jan 11, 2017, 02:58 PM Jan 2017

What Jeff Sessions's Role in Prosecuting the Klan Reveals About His Civil-Rights Record

good article and worth the time to read.

What Jeff Sessions's Role in Prosecuting the Klan Reveals About His Civil-Rights Record

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/sessions-kkk-case/512600/

Defenders of Trump’s choice for attorney general have cited an Alabama lynching case as evidence of his commitment to racial equality. The real story is more complicated.
Beulah Donald, center, wipes tears from her eyes as she enters funeral services for her 19-year-old son Michael in Mobile, Alabama, March 28, 1981. Mark Foley / AP

Adam Serwer Jan 9, 2017 Politics

Thirty-five years ago, the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Alabama played a crucial role in ensuring that the lynching of 19-year-old Michael Donald by two members of the Ku Klux Klan was investigated and punished.

That gruesome case has become newly relevant with the nomination of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions to run the Department of Justice. Sessions was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District when the Donald case was tried.

In 1986, Session’s nomination for a federal judgeship was rejected after one of his former subordinates, Thomas Figures, alleged that Sessions called him “boy,” made remarks disparaging civil-rights organizations, and made jokes about the KKK, even as his office was investigating the Donald lynching. Civil-rights groups have harshly criticized Sessions’s nomination, arguing that he is hostile to federal anti-discrimination and voting-rights law. Six members of the NAACP, including president Cornell Brooks, were arrested in early January after staging a sit-in at Sessions’s Mobile office.

After Sessions’s nomination was announced, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus whether Sessions’s record suggested he would be hostile to reforming local police agencies accused of racial bias. “Look at this man's life,” Priebus replied, citing the Donald case. “He prosecuted that person … for the murder. He then presided over the execution of this person.”................................

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What Jeff Sessions's Role in Prosecuting the Klan Reveals About His Civil-Rights Record (Original Post) riversedge Jan 2017 OP

Sessions Klan underpants Jan 2017 #1

Great article. Exposes the spin the RW are using to support Sessions' nomination. Dark n Stormy Knight Jan 2017 #2

underpants

(182,823 posts)

1. Sessions Klan

Reply to riversedge (Original post)

Wed Jan 11, 2017, 03:38 PM

Jan 2017

Thanks marking for later read.

Dark n Stormy Knight

(9,760 posts)

2. Great article. Exposes the spin the RW are using to support Sessions' nomination.

Reply to riversedge (Original post)

Wed Jan 11, 2017, 07:49 PM

Jan 2017

Supporters have repeatedly pointed to Sessions’s record to insist that he is in fact a champion of civil rights. But as in the Donald case, those claims have rarely held up to close scrutiny. Despite once claiming to have filed dozens of desegregation cases, Sessions appears to have filed none––instead taking credit for work done by the civil-rights division on which his signature was included merely as a formality. By contrast, one of Sessions’s signature efforts as a prosecutor was an attempt to convict three voting-rights activists on charges of fraud for assisting elderly voters in filling out ballots.

The Trump transition has urged supporters to highlight Sessions’s “strong civil rights record.” But the more closely that record is examined, the less it looks like the record of a civil-rights advocate of any kind, and the more it appears to be the standard, unremarkable record of a longtime conservative Republican from a Southern state.

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