What Jeff Sessions's Role in Prosecuting the Klan Reveals About His Civil-Rights Record

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hirty-five years ago, the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of Alabama played a crucial role in ensuring that the lynching of 19-year-old Michael Donald by two members of the Ku Klux Klan was investigated and punished.

That gruesome case has become newly relevant with the nomination of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions to run the Department of Justice. Sessions was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District when the Donald case was tried.

In 1986, Session’s nomination for a federal judgeship was rejected after one of his former subordinates, Thomas Figures, alleged that Sessions called him “boy,” made remarks disparaging civil-rights organizations, and made jokes about the KKK, even as his office was investigating the Donald lynching. Civil-rights groups have harshly criticized Sessions’s nomination, arguing that he is hostile to federal anti-discrimination and voting-rights law. Six members of the NAACP, including president Cornell Brooks, were arrested in early January after staging a sit-in at Sessions’s Mobile office.

After Sessions’s nomination was announced, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus whether Sessions’s record suggested he would be hostile to reforming local police agencies accused of racial bias. “Look at this man's life,” Priebus replied, citing the Donald case. “He prosecuted that person … for the murder. He then presided over the execution of this person.”

Other defenders of Sessions have used the Donald case in similar ways. A from 23 former assistant attorney generals cited the fact that he had “worked to obtain the successful capital prosecution of the head of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan” as evidence of his “commitment to the rule of law, and to the even-handed administration of justice.” said that Sessions, “won a death-penalty conviction for the head of the state KKK in a capital murder trial,” a case which “broke the Klan in the heart of dixie,” and praised him for having “successfully prosecuted the head of the state Ku Klux Klan for murder.” Grant Bosse wrote in the Manchester, New Hampshire, wrote that “when local police wrote off the murder as a drug deal gone wrong, Sessions brought in the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, and brought Hays and the Klan to justice.”