My testimony about Jeff Sessions’s racist remarks kept him from becoming a judge

I was a young lawyer in the civil rights division at the Justice Department in 1981 when I first encountered Jeff Sessions. At the time, Sessions was the new U.S. attorney for Alabama. I met him while I was handling a major voting rights case in Mobile, and I relayed a rumor I’d heard: A federal judge there had allegedly referred to a civil rights lawyer as “a traitor to his race” for taking on black clients. Sessions responded, “Well, maybe he is.”

Five years later, that startling incident came up again, after Sessions was nominated for a federal judgeship. The American Bar Association contacted me and my supervisor to ask for background on Sessions, as was standard in those days for judicial confirmations. I told the ABA about conversations I’d had with the U.S. attorney in which he referred to the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union as “un-American.” As he saw it, by fighting for racial equality, these groups were “trying to force civil rights down the throats of people who were trying to put problems behind them.”

I assumed that my deposition for the ABA would remain confidential, until one day, I got a surprise call. A car would be picking me up at the Justice Department in 30 minutes to take me to the Hill, where I would testify about Sessions in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee.