Peering down over his glasses, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was carefully choosing his words about Thurgood Marshall. He was looking Elena Kagan right in the eyes, and how could he not recall his own painful confirmation hearing twenty five years ago after Ronald Reagan nominated him as judge to the U.S. District Court in Alabama? That process did not go swimmingly for Jefferson Beauregard, as he was forced to defend his racist statements and a strange tolerance for the KKK. (He was “joking!” Sometimes, he confessed, he was “loose” with his tongue!) The Republican-controlled Judiciary Committee didn’t buy it, and they voted him down ten to eight, making him just the second nominee to the federal judiciary in half a century to have his nomination killed.
So might have ended the dreams and aspirations of young Jefferson Beauregard. But referring to a black Assistant U.S. Attorney as “boy” and warning him to “be careful what you say to white folks” isn’t necessarily a political death sentence in Alabama. In fact, it was just the publicity Jefferson Beauregard needed to get himself elected Attorney General in 1994, and just a few years later, to the U.S. Senate.
From his perch as ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jefferson Beauregard will lose this battle of opposing Elena Kagan’s nomination to the US Supreme Court, and the former clerk to Thurgood Marshall, America’s first black Supreme Court Justice, will be confirmed. A country that elected a black president in 2008 is, on the whole, not as riled by race. But Jeffereson Beauregard can still score points back home with his constituency by broadcasting his message loud and clear for all the South to hear. If he once called a white civil rights lawyer a “disgrace to his race” for defending blacks in voting rights cases, what could Jefferson Beauregard be thinking about the New York/Harvard Jew Girl before him who held Thurgood Marshall, “Mr. Civil Rights” in such high esteem?
There can be little doubt where Jefferson Beauregard would have stood in 1967 when Lyndon Baines Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the US Supreme Court. Jefferson Beauregard would have proudly joined the 11 white southerners who opposed Marshall’s nomination (and anti-lynching bills, and any civil rights legislation that came their way). He would have joined men like Herman Talmadge, and Strom Thurmond, the architect of the “Southern Manifesto,” which condemned the Brown v. Board of Education decision as a “clear abuse of judicial power.”
Jefferson Beauregard, (who claimed to have no use for groups like the NAACP because “they forced civil rights down the throats of people”) would have been right there with Thurmond and Talmadge, urging the Federal Government to stop interfering with the “Southern way of life.” They were the men Thurgood Marshall had to fight for decades, from countless, hostile whitewashed courthouses in small towns across the South, to the neoclassical U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, DC to end legalized segregation in America. The battle exhausted Marshall, who admitted he had sometimes grown weary “trying to save the white man’s soul.”
In 1986, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions was shot down by a Republican-controlled judiciary committee that seemed to be acknowledging at the time that there wasn’t much of a place in mainstream American politics for people like him. But Jefferson Beauregard found some crawl space, and it’s no surprise Americans can still hear the last echoed squeals from the Confederacy.
