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Civil Rights Leaders And Activists Continue Protests Against Sessions Nomination

by Gabe Ortiz on

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Civil rights leaders and activists continued ongoing protests against Jeff Sessions into this morning, as the Senate Judiciary Committee votes on advancing his nomination to the full Senate.

The hearing comes just hours after a chaotic evening for the White House, after Donald Trump fired acting Attorney General Sally Yates for declining to defend his unconstitutional Muslim ban, which has resulted in the detention or deportation of numerous refugees and Muslims.

Yesterday in Alabama, NAACP President Cornell Williams Brooks and about a dozen others were arrested after staging a sit-in in Sessions’ Mobile office.

“Monday’s protest came about four weeks after Brooks and other NAACP officials staged a similar sit-in at Sessions’ office in an attempt to compel the senator to remove himself from the attorney general nomination process,” reports USA Today.

“I think it’s clear that this administration is picking a fight with the American citizenry and the citizenry is making it clear that we’re not backing down; we’re not relenting,” President Brooks said.

Among others to speak out against Sessions’ nomination has been LGBTQ rights leader Judy Shepard, the mother of Matthew Shepard. In 1998, Matthew was brutally beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die for being gay. He was just 21.

Mrs. Shepard and the family of James Byrd Jr., a Black man who was heinously tortured and killed by three white supremacists in the same year, helped usher in 2009’s Hate Crimes Prevention Act — legislation signed by former President Obama and vehemently opposed by Sessions.

“As a parent who knows the true ramifications of hate, Sessions’ repeated efforts to diminish the life-changing acts of violence that are now covered in the Hate Crimes Prevention Act horrified me then,” Mrs. Shepard said.

“And now, this same person is being nominated as the country’s highest authority to represent justice and equal protection under the law for all Americans?”

Activists who gathered earlier today outside Sessions’ hearing in Washington DC also call his nomination “an imminent danger” to the rights of LGBTQ Americans, religious minorities, undocumented immigrants, and other vulnerable groups.