NAACP Protests Trump’s Attorney General Pick With Sit-In

@reuters
NAACP Protests Trump’s Attorney General Pick With Sit-In

(Reuters) – The NAACP staged a sit-in on Tuesday to protest the nomination of conservative U.S. Senator Jeff Sessions as the nation’s next Attorney General, vowing to occupy his Mobile, Alabama office until he withdrew as a candidate or demonstrators were arrested.

Sessions, 70, has a record of controversial positions on race, immigration and criminal justice reform. Along with the sit-in, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) organized demonstrations at his offices statewide to draw attention to their concerns about his track record.

“Senator Sessions has callously ignored the reality of voter suppression but zealously prosecuted innocent civil rights leaders on trumped-up charges of voter fraud,” NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks said in a news release. “As an opponent of the vote, he can’t be trusted to be the chief law enforcement officer for voting rights.”

Brooks posted a photo on Twitter of protesters in suits occupying the senator’s Mobile office.

Sessions’ office could not immediately be reached for comment.

President-elect Donald Trump in November named Sessions to lead the Justice Department and the FBI, and his history could see scrutiny during a confirmation process before his fellow senators.

Sessions was a federal prosecutor in 1986 when he became only the second nominee in 50 years to be denied confirmation as a federal judge. This came after allegations that he had made racist remarks, including testimony that he had called an African-American prosecutor “boy,” an allegation Sessions denied.

Sessions said he was not a racist but he said at his hearing that groups such as the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union could be considered “un-American.”

He also acknowledged that he had called the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a “piece of intrusive legislation.”

(Reporting by Letitia Stein; Editing by Andrew Hay)

Advertising

Start your day with National Memo Newsletter

Know first.

The opinions that matter. Delivered to your inbox every morning

American History Proves We Can Still Save Democracy From Trumpism

The Lincoln Memorial

Have you ever thought about the role guilt has played in our national life? It’s not omnipresent, it’s certainly not felt by everyone, most especially those sinned against, but I would say guilt rivals pride as the thing that has most motivated us. Think about it for a moment. The founding of this country wasn’t an immaculate birth – for one thing, there wasn’t a Founding Mother among all those long-heralded Founding Fathers, and one of the two greatest mistakes they made the day they came to an agreement on our founding document was what they left out. They didn’t award women full citizenship, and they failed to deal in any way with the sin of slavery.

Keep reading...Show less
How Fox Props Up The House Republicans' Impeachment Farce

Sean Hannity

Fox News propagandists are still eagerly shoveling Rep. James Comer’s (R-KY) slop to their viewers, nearly one year into the House Oversight Committee chair’s shambolic campaign to damage President Joe Biden’s political standing by focusing on his son Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

Keep reading...Show less
{{ post.roar_specific_data.api_data.analytics }}