title:  Coretta Scott King Wrote A Letter Opposing Jeff Sessions And Republicans Have Been Hiding It Since 1986
text: This is how far Republicans will go to protect a racist in their party.Thirty years after Congress rejected Jeff Sessions  nomination as a federal judge, the Alabama Republican who only had a problem with the KKK because they smoked marijuana is once again up for a critical government post that could set voting rights back for generations.Donald Trump s nomination of Sessions as Attorney General has raised alarm bells across the nation as civil rights groups fear he will gut the Justice Department, particularly the division that investigates and fights voting rights and civil rights violations.As a federal attorney, Sessions slapped voter fraud charges against black volunteers in his home state who were tasked with picking up and delivering absentee ballots to the post office so they could be counted. Sessions lost the case, and no one was indicted because the volunteers did nothing wrong. Sessions just hates black people and sees their voting as a crime.Even former colleagues testified that Sessions is a racist.According to the New York Times,In testimony before the committee, former colleagues said that Mr. Sessions had referred to the N.A.A.C.P., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other civil rights groups as  un-American  and  Communist-inspired.  An African-American federal prosecutor then, Thomas H. Figures, said Mr. Sessions had referred to him as  boy  and testified that Mr. Sessions said the Ku Klux Klan was fine  until I found out they smoked pot. If you still need proof that Sessions is a racist, just consider that white supremacists cheered when Trump announced his nomination.But there is one piece of testimony that Republicans have been suppressing for decades that would be a nail in the coffin of Sessions  effort to become Attorney General.In 1986, Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote a letter of testimony to the Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee that ended up rejecting Sessions.Buzzfeed reports that racist Senator Strom Thurmond refused to put the letter in the Congressional record and the contents have been kept from public view ever since. But Knight Rider reporter Aaron Epstein published a piece of it in 1986 that explains why we should not believe Sessions when he claims he isn t racist. For a century, the racial practices that characterized our region were established and enforced by men who, like Mr. Sessions, protested that they, too, were not personally hostile to blacks,  King wrote.And that line alone should disqualify Sessions from ever being more than a racist senator. Because the last thing this country needs is a racist Attorney General in charge of the very institution that investigates voter suppression, discrimination, and hate crimes against people of color.Featured Image: Wikimedia