The disruption took place almost immediately after Sessions entered the chamber for his confirmation hearing. Sessions is President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for attorney general, and has faced extreme criticism for a joke he made roughly three decades ago that was deemed racially insensitive.
The two men stood on chairs, donned sheets and oversized mock foam fingers that read “Go Jeffie Boy!” and “KKK,” while shouting mock support for the Alabama Senator.
— Cameron Joseph (@cam_joseph) January 10, 2017
As cops stepped in to remove the protesters, they shouted, “you can’t arrest me, I’m white!”
Two of Senator Sessions’ most notable acts were helping to desegregate schools in Alabama by filing dozens of civil rights cases and successfully working with the state in obtaining the death penalty for Klansman Henry Francis Hays for the lynching of 19-year-old Michael Donald, who was black. Hays was executed in 1997, and Donald’s death was the last recorded KKK lynching to occur in the nation.
Hays was also the first white man executed in Alabama for the crime of murdering a black person since 1913.
"I prosecuted the head of the Klan for murdering somebody, and I insisted the klansman be given the death penalty. When I became attorney general years later, I handled that appeal and ensured that he was, in fact, executed,” Sessions told Mark Hemingway of the Weekly Standard in 2009.
Sessions later brought federal charges against Hays’s accomplice and his father in relation to the murder. His office successfully obtained a life sentence for the accomplice.
He spent nearly two decades going after the KKK in Alabama.
The successful prosecution of Hays also led to a $7-million civil judgement against the KKK, which bankrupted the group in Alabama.
— Marc Perrone (@Marc_Perrone) January 10, 2017
On Monday, a group of black pastors came out in his defense.
"Americans are living in a toxic climate where the serious charge of racism is carelessly leveled against anyone with whom the Left disagrees," Reverend Dean Nelson, board chairman of the Frederick Douglass Foundation and minister at Salem Baptist Church in Virginia, said during a news conference on Monday in the Cannon House office building. "We are here today to make it perfectly clear that this attack against Senator Jeff Sessions is baseless and that he is more than qualified to be the next attorney general."
Despite his track record, the hearing was interrupted multiple times by groups of protesters.
