The harrowing past of a top Bush judicial nominee: Civil rights opposition, commie hunting and a partner who publicly decried "queers, quacks, quirks, political agitators."
By Joe Conason for Salon.
Now that we have revisited Mississippi in 1948 with Trent Lott, perhaps America will take another look at the Magnolia State during the '60s and '70s with Lott's judicial protégé, Charles W. Pickering Sr. Aspects of that era came up last year when the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Pickering's nomination to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the details are again salient now that Bush has renominated him.Pickering's résumé displays many of the most unappetizing characteristics of the segregationist milieu from which he and so many other white Mississippi politicians have emerged. He did once testify against a Klan member, as his supporters incessantly repeat, but that single instance must be weighed against a long record of apparent hostility to equal rights for blacks. He and his supporters insist that he was a moderate, rather than a hardcore racist. But in the South of the Citizens Councils, a "moderate" was someone who defended segregation but didn't practice or advocate brutal violence to suppress the black freedom struggle.
One thing in Pickering's long career is quite clear: He left the Democratic Party to join the Republicans in 1964 in protest against the Democrats' support for civil rights.
Here is the full text of the article in case the link goes bad:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/01/09/bush/index.html
Joe Conason's Journal
The harrowing past of a top Bush judicial nominee: Civil rights opposition, commie hunting and a partner who publicly decried "queers, quacks, quirks, political agitators."
Jan. 9, 2003 | Still burning
Now that we have revisited Mississippi in 1948 with Trent Lott, perhaps America will take another look at the Magnolia State during the '60s and '70s with Lott's judicial protégé, Charles W. Pickering Sr. Aspects of that era came up last year when the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Pickering's nomination to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the details are again salient now that Bush has renominated him.
Pickering's résumé displays many of the most unappetizing characteristics of the segregationist milieu from which he and so many other white Mississippi politicians have emerged. He did once testify against a Klan member, as his supporters incessantly repeat, but that single instance must be weighed against a long record of apparent hostility to equal rights for blacks. He and his supporters insist that he was a moderate, rather than a hardcore racist. But in the South of the Citizens Councils, a "moderate" was someone who defended segregation but didn't practice or advocate brutal violence to suppress the black freedom struggle.
One thing in Pickering's long career is quite clear: He left the Democratic Party to join the Republicans in 1964 in protest against the Democrats' support for civil rights.
Pickering's habit of whitewashing his past conduct has led him perilously close to lying under oath. When George H.W. Bush first named him to the federal bench in 1990 (two years after he chaired the Bush-Quayle campaign in Mississippi), Pickering told the Senate that he'd had no contact with the State Sovereignty Commission, his home state's notorious anti-black secret police apparatus.
"I never had any contact with that agency," he testified. Not quite true, as the since-unsealed records of the Sovereignty Commission reveal. Actually, in January 1972, Pickering apparently asked [see last page of memo] a Commission employee to keep him apprised of its surveillance of an integrated union-organizing campaign among pulpwood workers in his hometown. Later, Pickering claimed that he had been worried about "Klan" infiltration of the pulpwood workers union, but the Commission documents show clearly that it was investigating left-wing integrationists, not the KKK.
The Sovereignty Commission files, now available online, provide a primary-source perspective on the white reign of terror in Mississippi. Many of the documents mention Carroll Gartin, the former lieutenant governor who oversaw the Commission's spying, smearing and protection of thuggery -- and who also happened to have been Pickering's law partner. Perhaps Gartin was a "moderate" by Dixie standards, but it is hard to see how that description fits his role with the Sovereignty Commission.
In a March 2, 1964 memo to Gartin and then-Gov. Paul Johnson, a staffer describes how the Sovereignty Commission helped local authorities to suppress civil rights demonstrations in Hattiesburg and Canton. Among other things, its spies made sure to take "motion pictures" of the "native Negroes" who showed up at the demonstrations.
That same year, Gartin directed a campaign against Tougaloo College, a historically black institution that had been integrated and that served as a base for civil rights activity in northern Mississippi. Working closely with the Sovereignty Commission, which used secret informants at the college, Gartin sought to remove Tougaloo's accreditation and successfully drove its liberal white president to resign. Gartin called the school a haven of "queers, quacks, quirks, political agitators and possibly some communists."
Considerable evidence exists to suggest that Pickering hasn't entirely discarded the prejudices once espoused by his late law partner. As a jurist he has been no friend of the downtrodden; to portray him as a lifelong racial moderate is ludicrous on its face. Pickering should stop covering up his past -- and start speaking candidly about what he did that was shameful, and when he changed his views, if ever.
[2:21 p.m. PST, Jan. 9, 2003]
