Sunday, July 26, 2020

the last book I ever read (The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan, excerpt five)

from The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan by Laurence Leamer:

Figures considered his new boss, Jefferson “Jeff” Beauregard Sessions III, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama and a future United States senator, as a closet racist. Figures said that Sessions called him “boy,” the most demeaning of terms for a southern black man. And the Reagan appointee also said that he figured the Klan was okay until he learned some of its members smoked pot. Sessions said later he was only joking, but such comments made Figures even more suspicious of what even the most elevated people truly thought about his race. Yet Sessions believed almost as strongly as Figures that the Civil Rights Division should enter the case, and by his actions in that matter hardly seemed a racist.



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