On Tuesday night, Senator Elizabeth Warren was stopped from sharing a letter written by Coretta Scott King addressed to Strom Thurmond in 1986. In the letter, King discussed what Jeff Session, our new Attorney General for the United States, had done while he was the U.S. Attorney in Alabama.
In the letter she details his blatant prosecution of civil rights workers, she discussed how he attempted to “chill” the black vote and keep African Americans away from the polls. In this historical and moving letter, King was able to convince a Republican controlled senate in 1986, to prevent Sessions from becoming a federal judge.
However, fast-forward to 2017, when Warren attempted to read the letter written by Coretta Scott King, on the Senate floor, where nominations are to be debated, she was told she was in violation of Rule 19.
Here are 7 Crucial Statements Coretta Scott King Made Regarding Jeff Sessions and his fight to suppress the black vote in Alabama.
- Civil rights leaders, including my husband and Albert Turner, have fought long and hard to achieve free and unfettered access to the ballot box. Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge. This simply cannot be allowed to happen.
- From His Politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights laws, indicates that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgement to be a federal judge.
- A person who has exhibited so much hostility to the enforcement of those laws, and thus, to the exercise of those rights by Black people should not be elevated to the federal bench.
- The irony of Mr. Sessions’ nomination is that, if confirmed, he will be given life tenure for doing with a federal prosecution what the local sheriffs accomplished twenty years ago with clubs and cattle prods.
- No group has had access to the ballow box denied so presistently and intently. over the past century, a broad array of schemes have been used in attempts to block the Black vote…. from straightforward application of brutality against black citizens who tried to vote to such legalized frauds as “grandfather clause” exclusion and rigged literacy tests. The actions taken by Mr. Sessions in regard to the 1984 voting fraud prosecutions represent just one more technique used to intimidate black voters and thus deny them this most precious franchise.
- Mr. Sessions sought to punish older black civil rights activists, advisors and colleagues of my husband, who had been key figures in the civil rights movement in the ’60s. These were persons who, realizing the potential of the absentee vote among blacks, had learned to use the process within the bbunds of legality and had taught others to do the same.
- The scope and character of the investigation conducted by Mr. Sessions also warrant grave concern. Witnesses were selectively chosen in accordance with the favorability of their testimony….prosecution illegally withheld critical statements made by witnesses. Many elderlly blacks were visited multiple times by the FBI who then hauled them over 180 miles by bus to a grand jury in Mobile when they could more easily have testified at a grand jury twenty miles away in Selma. These voters, and others, have announced they are now never going to vote again.
Read Coretta Scott King’s Full Letter Here
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