Past racial insensitivity by Sotomayor detractor. Ref: Sessions vows third GOP vote against Sotomayor

   By: Ken Bode
Sometime next week, Sonia Sotomayor will be confirmed as the first person of Hispanic descent ever to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Over the past 219 years, there have been two women and two African-Americans on the court along with 106 white males.

Sotomayor will be confirmed because the Senate Judiciary Committee could find nothing disqualifying in her 17 years experience on the federal bench. Still, suspicious Republicans on the panel turned to her personal views, especially as related to ethnicity. Has ever a single sentence been so blown out of proportion as when Sotomayor suggested that because of her life’s experiences a wise Latina might reach a better conclusion than a white male?

Especially for the ranking white male on the Republican inquisition forces on the committee, Sotomayor’s comment was deeply troubling. In the mind of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Sotomayor’s comment revealed excessive racial sensitivity, and Sessions sought to turn it into a mountain blocking Senate approval.

Sessions knows about racial insensitivity. Now the lead Republican interrogator, Sessions was at the Judiciary Committee witness table 23 years ago, nominated for a federal judgeship by President Ronald Reagan. Then, too, the issue was excessive racial insensitivity. Sessions was serving as a U.S. attorney in Alabama, and some of the things he’d been doing and saying were brought to the attention of the committee.

For example, Sessions called a white civil rights attorney who litigated voting rights cases “a disgrace to his race.” He addressed an assistant U.S. attorney as “boy” and warned him, “Be careful what you say to white folks.” He admitted he thought the Ku Klux Klan was an “OK” organization until he learned that some of them smoked pot. Also, Sessions condemned the NAACP and ACLU as “un-American” and “Communist inspired,” because they “forced civil rights down the throats of people.”

   Jeff Sessions [ Enlarge ]
But it was what he did that mattered most. Sessions served as U.S. attorney at a time when black voter registration drives were threatening white control of county courthouses in rural Alabama. Who wins elections for governor or senator is of minor importance to the locals compared to who wins the job of county sheriff, prosecutor, judge, clerk, treasurer and assessor.

In the 1980s, Perry County, Ala., retained its old plantation roots of unremitting distrust between its black majority and white minority. With black voter registration surging in Perry County, control of country government was dangerously close to shifting. So U.S. Attorney Sessions used the power of his office to back charges by the white courthouse crowd that a black civil rights group was tampering with absentee ballots.

An investigation was ordered and federal officials were waiting at the post office when the Perry County Civic League mailed 504 absentee ballots for the 1984 Democratic primary. The ballots were opened, marked, numbered and searched for erasures or new markings.

Searching for evidence of tampering, FBI investigators contacted 1,500 black families in Perry County, terrifying many first-time voters in their 70s and 80s. Among those charged with 29 counts of altering ballots and mail fraud was Albert Turner, an adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Turner helped plan the Selma march and was later chosen to guide the mule train that carried King to his gravesite. He and his two Perry County co-defendants faced 115 years in prison.

The investigation is estimated to have cost the government $500,000, and it produced evidence so thin that it took the jury less than four hours to throw out the case.

Sessions was so obviously guilty of racism and overreaching his prosecutorial authority that the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 8-to-6 to derail his nomination. The majority against him included two Republicans and his home state senator, Howell Heflin.

I covered those events for NBC News, and during the Sotomayor hearings I wondered what Jeff Sessions had learned about racial insensitivity and impartiality. Evidently, not much.

About The Author(s): Ken Bode — is the Pulliam Professor of Journalism at DePauw University and a Hudson adjunct fellow. His academic career includes being the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism as well as the Dean of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University from 1998 to 2002; a John L. Hughes University Professor and Director of the Center for Contemporary Media at DePauw University from 1989 1997; and an assistant professor of political science at Michigan State University from 1965 to 1969 and at SUNY Binghamton from 1969 to 1970. Bode is a 1961 graduate of the University of South Dakota, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in philosophy and government. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina in 1963 and 1966, respectively. He has taught at Michigan State University and the State University of New York at Binghamton. Bode was a post-doctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University in 1978 and a Poynter Fellow in journalism at Yale University in 1989. He also was a senior adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute in Indianapolis.

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