Despite allegations of racism dogging the heels of the man President-elect Donald Trump has nominated for attorney general, there are some saying that these characterizations of the Alabama senator are not true including William Smith, the first Black Republican chief counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Smith said he was hired by Sessions, and worked with him for nearly a decade.
Smith added that the people making the accusations of racism are doing so because they do not agree with Sessions politically.
Smith went on to dispel any notion that Sessions is a racist, noting that during his time as Alabama’s attorney general, Sessions desegregated the school systems and prosecuted the head of the Ku Klux Klan, ensuring the klansman received the death penalty.
U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow issued high praise for Donald Trump’s “inspired” decision to tap Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions.
“Senator Sessions is a good man and a great man. He has done more to protect the jobs and enhance the wages of Black workers than anyone in either house of Congress over the last 10 years,” Kirsanow told Breitbart.
Arguably no U.S. lawmaker has worked more tirelessly than Sessions to uphold the legacy of Civil Rights leaders, Kirsanow said that of all the senators and public officials that he’s dealt with, “I cannot think of anyone who has been more devoted to issues related to wages and employment levels of all Americans, but particularly Black American workers.”
“Sen. Sessions has been a leader in the fight for preserving American jobs and ensuring opportunities for African American workers,” civil rights attorney and founder of the Black American Leadership Alliance, Leah Durant, told Breitbart News.
On the other hand, Session’s comment about the Klan probably cost him as federal judgeship. In the case where he was prosecuting Klan members for the killing of an Anferica American man.
When Sessions learned that some members of the Klan had smoked marijuana on the evening of the slaying, he said aloud that he thought the KKK was: “OK until I found out they smoked pot.”
Sessions insisted that he was joking, when he made the statement.
Yet despite these positive comments, civil rights organizations maintain their positions about Sessions, who has an F rating from the NAACP, and Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center told The Washington Post that Sessions being included in Trump’s cabinet is “a tragedy for American politics.”
