Supporters of U.S. District Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. compare his confirmation hearings to the McCarthy era. That critique misses the point. I’d compare it to the Nuremberg Trials–or, better yet, to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Are those comparisons too harsh? Not for those of us who were on the receiving end of the racial apartheid that Pickering once helped to uphold. Questions about his past explain why his nomination to the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans has become President Bush’s first big judicial confirmation fight.
Pickering’s Feb. 7 hearing went all the way back to his college days to dig up tidbits like the article he penned in 1959 as a 21-year-old law student in the University of Mississippi Law Journal. Without expressing a hint of moral reservation, it suggested how the state could salvage its overturned ban on interracial marriages to “serve the purpose that the legislature undoubtedly intended it to serve.”
More Top Picks Rain Barrels
It was just an “academic exercise,” Pickering says now. But some observers were not impressed, especially those of us who remember how disregarding the “white” and “colored” signs on restrooms, water fountains and restaurants in the South could get you killed.
“This hearing is a painful recollection of America’s civil rights history,” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who was one of Pickering’s toughest interrogators during his hearing. (The committee probably will vote by the end of the month on Pickering’s confirmation.)
Yes, such recollections apparently are so painful that Pickering had some trouble recalling all that he was doing at the time. Take, for example, his alleged associations with his state’s notorious Sovereignty Commission.
From 1956 to 1973, that supersecretive body devoted itself to protecting the state’s “sovereignty,” meaning its racial segregation laws and traditions, against the U.S. Supreme Court and other pesky Washington intrusions.
It spied on civil rights groups and targeted civil rights sympathizers for firings, beatings and maybe even killings. Leaked documents revealed that the commission secretly helped the defense team of avowed racist Byron de la Beckwith, who escaped punishment in two trials for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers. He finally was convicted in 1994 after the documents leaked out.
Pickering testified in 1990, when appointed by the first President Bush, that he had no contact with the commission. He further denied that it was still in business in the 1970s when Pickering was a state senator. Yet a document that was unearthed when the commission’s files were opened to the public in 1998 showed Pickering’s response to be less than truthful. As a state senator, the document indicated, he had “requested to be advised of developments” in a labor dispute in Laurel, Miss., in the early 1970s.
“If I were making that decision today, I would not do it,” Pickering replied to Durbin’s questioning.
Pickering also denied that former Mississippi Lt. Gov. Carroll Gartin, who was Pickering’s law partner from 1961 to 1971, was a segregationist. But Pickering changed that tune when Durbin waved copies of an old campaign ad. It showed Gartin waving a pen with which, he declares in the ad, he “will veto any effort to weaken our defenses around our Southern way of life.”
Pickering said he believed Gartin was “trying to move the state forward and still stay in politics.” Right. Sometimes you have to go along to get ahead.
With that in mind, Pickering deserves praise for courageously testifying in 1967 against Sam Bowers, a Ku Klux Klan leader who was being tried for the firebombing death of Vernon Dahmer Sr., a civil rights leader who was helping blacks register to vote.
Pickering’s testimony against Bowers cost Pickering his re-election as the local prosecutor, Medgar Evers’ brother Charles Evers wrote in a Wall Street Journal piece in support of Pickering.
On the other hand, William Taylor, a Washington lawyer who served on the Washington, D-C.-based Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights at that time, pointed out that, by that time, even the white establishment of Mississippi had begun to decide that Klan violence was bad for business.
And Charles Evers, who went on to become a civil rights leader and a small-town mayor before switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party, was listed in the Sovereignty Commission’s documents among the 5,000 tipsters, black and white, who informed on their neighbors. When Time magazine asked him about it in 1998, he was quoted as saying, “If you don’t know who your enemies are and talk to them, how are you going to deal with them.”
Yes, if Charles Evers sees the value in going along to get ahead, he probably learned it from the masters of the game.
Bush should withdraw this nomination to spare the nation and his administration any more pain.
———-
E-mail: [email protected]