Martin Luther King, Jr.’s late widow wrote in fervent opposition to Sessions’ 1986 nomination to the bench. Until today, her testimony was lost to time.
A potent new voice joined the chorus of opposition to Donald Trump’s nominee for Attorney General, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), on Tuesday night — one from beyond the grave.
The late Coretta Scott King famously opposed Sessions’ 1986 nomination to a federal judgeship in Alabama. But because then-Judiciary Chairman Strom Thurmond (R-TN) had never entered her 1l800-word letter testifying against Sessions into the congressional record, no copies were publicly available as Sessions faced his Senate colleagues on Tuesday morning. Buzzfeed reported that Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) had declined to release a copy and that no others were publicly accessible.
Tuesday evening, the Washington Post published the letter and testimony in full. In it, King invokes her slain husband to underscore not just the importance of voting rights, but the impropriety of Sessions’ conduct in the 1984 prosecution of black ballot access activists who had marched with King in Selma.
“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,” King wrote in her testimony.
LETTER: Coretta Scott King letter to Strom Thurmond - which he never admitted into the record.
More: Coretta Scott King: Jeff Sessions would ‘irreparably damage’ my husband’s work
This letter is very damaging to Sessions! Very damaging!
