Sessions’ Complicated History With Race

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to serve as U.S. Attorney General, has been dogged by accusations of racism throughout his career. In a lengthy profile, the Washington Post examines Sessions’ personal background in Alabama, starting as a young Boy Scout who attended segregated schools. It examines the complex web of race-related issues Sessions faced as Alabama’s attorney general, a U.S. attorney, and four-term Republican senator. Sessions was the lead attorney on the infamous “Marion Three” voter fraud case in 1985, which accused three black voting rights activists of illegally tampering with absentee ballots. He lost the case. As a Senator, Sessions voted to renew the Voting Rights Act, calling it “intrusive” but “necessary,” but when the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the law in 2013, Sessions called it “good news … for the South.”

But Sessions also hired African Americans for senior positions, and worked tirelessly to convict two Ku Klux Klan members for the 1983 lynching of a young black man. He also sponsored legislation to award the Congressional Gold Medal to the “foot soldiers” who took part in the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. “After coming of age in the Deep South during the darkest days of the civil rights movement, Sessions has struggled to reconcile the racial politics of his region with the changing national discourse that lifted long-standing legal barriers for minorities,” the Post reports.