Welcome to the latest edition in our war on voting series. This is a joint project of Meteor Blades and Joan McCarter.
A Trump administration represented at the Department of Justice by Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the man who was too racist for a Republican Senate to confirm him as a federal judge in the 1980s, is the capper on a long, long year in the war on voting. Ari Berman has the background on Sessions' long, long racist fight against civil rights.
On March 7, 1965, Albert Turner, a tall, sturdy bricklayer from Marion, Alabama, walked directly behind John Lewis during the infamous Bloody Sunday march in Selma. When Lewis fell from the force of police blows, so did Turner. “I fell down and ran,” he said. “Then I fell down again and ran some more.”
After the passage of the Voting Rights Act (VRA), Turner became known as “Mr. Voter Registration,” working as Alabama field secretary for Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. After King’s assassination, Turner led the mule wagon that carried King’s body through the streets of Atlanta. […]
In the Democratic primary of September 1984, FBI agents hid behind the bushes of the Perry County post office, waiting for Turner and fellow activist Spencer Hogue to mail 500 absentee ballots on behalf of elderly black voters. When Turner and Hogue left, the feds seized the envelopes from the mail slots. Twenty elderly black voters from Perry County were bused three hours to Mobile, where they were interrogated by law-enforcement officials and forced to testify before a grand jury. Ninety-two-year-old Willie Bright was so frightened of “the law” that he wouldn’t even admit he’d voted.
In January 1985, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the 39-year-old US Attorney for the Southern District of Alabama, charged Turner, his wife Evelyn, and Hogue with 29 counts of mail fraud, altering absentee ballots, and conspiracy to vote more than once. They faced over 100 years in jail on criminal charges and felony statutes under the VRA—provisions of the law that had scarcely been used to prosecute the white officials who had disenfranchised blacks for so many years. The Turners and Hogue became known as the Marion Three. (This story is best told in Lani Guinier’s book Lift Every Voice.)
The trial was held in Selma, of all places. The jury of seven blacks and five whites deliberated for less than three hours before returning a not-guilty verdict on all counts.
Just four months later President Reagan put Sessions' name forward for a federal judgeship on the District Court of Alabama, a nomination so egregious that lawyers from the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division—who were working in the Reagan administration!—testified against him:
Gerry Hebert, who worked in the Department of Justice’s Voting Section, told Congress that Sessions had called the NAACP and ACLU “Communist-inspired” and “un-American,” and labeled the white civil-rights lawyer Jim Blacksher “a disgrace to his race.” Thomas Figures, a black assistant US Attorney in Mobile, said that Sessions had repeatedly referred to him as “boy.” Figures said he heard from colleagues that Sessions “used to think [the KKK] were OK” until he learned that were “pot smokers.” Sessions admitted to calling the VRA a “piece of intrusive legislation.”
Republican senators joined with Democrats to defeat this nomination—a defeat that Sessions avenged by running for and winning a Senate seat. That seat is now his launching pad to become the chief law enforcement officer of the land. Because Trump. Call your senators. Tell them to keep Trump's racists out of our government.
By the way, Hillary Clinton has won the popular vote by 1,439,123 votes as of Friday. If you haven't signed the petition to do away with the Electoral College, please do.
For more on this week in the war on voting, head below the fold.