In Alabama, Jeff Sessions Desegregated Schools and Got the Death Penalty for KKK Head
12:25 PM, Nov 18, 2016 | By Mark Hemingway
http://www.weeklystandard.com/in-ala...rticle/2005461
Now that Jeff Sessions is Donald Trump's pick for attorney general, you're going to hear a lot of people dig up old accusations that Sessions is a racist. In fact, CNN did so last night. However, between the nature of the accusations and
Sessions's actual record of desegregating schools and taking on the Klan in Alabama, it
strains credulity to believe that he is a racist....
...Sessions's
actual track record certainly doesn't suggest he's a racist.
Quite the opposite, in fact. As a U.S. Attorney he filed several cases to desegregate schools in Alabama. And he also prosecuted the head of the state Klan, Henry Francis Hays, for abducting and killing Michael Donald, a black teenager selected at random. Sessions
insisted on the death penalty for Hays. When he was later elected the state Attorney General, Sessions
followed through and made sure Hays was executed. The successful prosecution of Hays also led to a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan,
effectively breaking the back of the KKK in Alabama.
As a U.S. attorney, he also prosecuted a group of civil rights activists, which included a former aide to Martin Luther King Jr., for voter fraud in Perry County, Alabama. The case fell apart, and Sessions bluntly told me he "failed to make the case." This incident has also been used to claim that Sessions is racist—
but it shouldn't be. The county has been dogged with accusations of voter fraud for decades. In 2008, state and federal officials investigated voter fraud in Perry County after "a local citizens group gathered affidavits detailing several cases in which at least one Democratic county official paid citizens for their votes, or encouraged them to vote multiple times." A detailed story in the Tuscaloosa News reported that voting patterns in one Perry County town were also mighty suspicious in 2012:
"Uniontown has a population of 1,775, according to the 2010 census but, according to the Perry County board of registrars, has 2,587 registered voters. The total votes cast there Tuesday—1,431—represented a turnout of 55 percent of the number of registered voters and a whopping 80.6 percent of the town's population."...