These were particularly tense times in Camden, Alabama. 1966 was the first year that newly registered African American voters could elect their own candidate, accidentally including the office of sheriff. A black Vietnam veteran named Walter J. Calhoun took up the challenge to run for office in deeply segregated Wilcox County. White officials quickly mobilized to threaten Black tenant farmers from voting, a model that had likely influenced the young Sessions, who was born in Selma in 1946 but got his secondary education at the Wilcox County High School in Camden, Alabama. As a civil rights worker affiliated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma and in Wilcox County in 1967–68, followed by brief returns to the field over the past decades, I saw close up what white power looked like (Scheper-Hughes 2003, 2016). Despite the Voting Rights Act of 1965, throughout southwest Alabama black people were harassed for voting. On one occasion, my black SNCC coworker and I were run out of Camden by Alabama police as they waved guns in our faces. In Wilcox County I recorded, transcribed, and published interviews with black tenant farmers whose cotton allotment checks were stolen by plantation [452]owners, with black women who were denied welfare or healthcare unless they agreed to be “spayed” (the term used by health and welfare officials), with women who were raped by their landlords, and with husbands who were pistol-whipped for protesting (Scheper-Hughes and Hunt 1969). On another occasion, four of us civil rights workers were driven off the road by local Ku Klux Klan members.

Black tenant farmers and their families were hungry and their children undernourished. Our investigation of collusion between the USDA food program and the agricultural industry eventually led to a class action suit in 1968 (Peoples v. United States Department of Agriculture 1970). Nonetheless, the Klan remained the ruling party in Wilcox County well into the end of the twentieth century. Jury panels were white. Lynchings continued. This was the code of injustice in south and southwest Alabama during Sessions’ twelve years as federal attorney general for the Southern District. Throughout his career, Sessions displayed his loyalties to the code of white supremacy.

The black belt counties of southwest Alabama were among the worst examples of the violent application of Jim Crow laws enforced by white power, racist plantation owners. The words “violent” and “racist” adequately describe the terrorist climate for black tenant farmers, especially young black males in southwest Alabama. Camden, Alabama has been memorialized in local histories and in a photographic essay book, Down home: Camden, Alabama, by the celebrated civil rights photographer Bob Adelman, in which he reflects, “As I photographed the people in the book, I tried to render them as vividly and precisely as possible. Now they seem like characters caught in a dream—part pleasurable fantasy of revered traditions, ante-bellum homes and plantations; and part the nightmare of racism and poverty. . . . The dream begins to dissolve” (1972: xlviii).

During his fourteen years as federal attorney general of Southern Alabama, Sessions demeaned his black associates, expressed hostility toward civil rights organizations and rights workers, and ignored complaints by black citizens who had been blocked from voting in their counties. He oversaw the executions of mentally and cognitively disabled people. He supported grossly unequal distribution of public funds, favoring private white schools over what later became predominately black public schools. These allegations were vetted and carefully covered by the media and in special reports (Baker 2017; Cohn 2017; Lapowsky and Greenberg 2016; Potok 2017; Serwer 2016; Zamost, Devine, and Noel 2016).

Most telling, however, was Sessions’ role in the federal investigation of a 1981 lynching of a 19-year-old African American man in Montgomery, Michael Donald. The investigation ultimately concluded that members of the Ku Klux Klan had savagely beaten and killed Donald and hung his body from a tree. Thomas Figures, an assistant US attorney in Alabama during the same time period, testified during the congressional hearings that Sessions tried to drop the investigation into the lynching of Mr. Donald (Kornbluth 1987; Serwer 2017). Today Sessions takes credit for the investigation, a political tactic of white washing. Meanwhile, the lynchings continued.

Black martyrs

While there were many reasons why Jeff Sessions should have been disqualified, my objections, based on public records and interviews with families in Selma and [453]Wilcox County, concern the failure of Sessions and his associates to investigate many other alleged “lynchings”—a term used today to refer to “summary executions,” or lynchings by other means. In the Selma civil rights museum and in the Selma public library are long lists of publicly recognized lynchings, many of which were never investigated, let alone prosecuted. In the National Voting Rights Museum and Institute in Selma, there is a wall memorizing the footsoldier and the black martyrs of the civil rights movement. In the course of our civil rights work and its aftermath, Kathy Veit and I can testify to the existence of three cases, which we encountered through personal relationships and serendipitously.

Ethel Brooks of Camden, Alabama (see Figure 2), died mysteriously when her car crashed on a bridge on a clear day in 1985. She was driving home to Coy from Camden, where she worked at an elementary school, as she did every day. The local police filed the case as a car accident, a story that no one in Coy believed. To this day they say that Brooks was forced into crashing at that bridge railing. I lived in the Brooks household during the summer of 1967 and worked with Ethel and her father, Jesse Brooks, both of whom were prominent local civil leaders in the 1960s. During the first week I spent there, a carload of white boys shot at Ethel and Jesse’s pick up truck, shouting racist epithets and warnings at them, and telling them to quit what they were doing. The bullet grazed Ethel’s head, and I washed and bandaged the wound. She warned that I would have to leave as among the threats to her, some were because she was keeping a “white n*****” in her house.

Figure 2: Ethel Brooks in 1965 Coy High School Yearbook. Copyright www.crmvet.org, Labor donated, Civil Rights Movement Veterans.

The brutal executions of two young Black men in Selma and Perry counties in 1979 came to Kathy Veit’s attention accidentally. A few years ago she began to look for a group of men who appeared in a compelling group photo she snapped in 1978 [454]at the now defunct Selma Cotton Compression Company (see Figure 3). The men working on the dock of the compress were taking a break and they enjoyed having their photo taken. Veit wanted to know what had happened to these men over the years and how life had treated them since the end of the civil rights period that lasted just twelve years after the famous “Bloody Sunday” march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965. After many failed attempts, Veit located one of the men in the photo, Willie Shanks (see Figure 4). Shanks was living in a small home just a block away from the old Selma Cotton Compress.

LEFT: Figure 3 – The Selma Cotton Compress in 1978. Photo by Kathy Veit.
RIGHT: Figure 4 – Kathy Veit and Willie Shanks in Selma, Alabama, 2014. Photo by Nancy Scheper-Hughes.[455]

Shanks looked at the 1978 photo with great interest and was able to identify all of his coworkers at the cotton compress where they had been employed. Of the eight men in the photo, the majority was dead, prematurely. He had stories to tell about each of them, but he focused on two of the men in the photo: Sammie Lee Johnson and Willie Nichols. According to Shanks, both men had been “lynched” in May 1979, just one year after the photo was taken. He shared this view with the official civil rights community in Selma (see Figure 5). In the photo, Shanks is the man standing on the left in white clothes. Sammie Lee Johnson is the sturdy man standing in a white tank top. Willie James Nichols is the little guy on the right, a gentle, religious, and hardworking man.

Figure 5: Excerpt from Selma Library Archive of lynchings in Alabama.

At the time of the lynching, no one could understand why Nichols (known as the “Bible Man”) was killed and dumped in the Alabama River. Sammie Lee Johnson (according to Shanks) was kidnapped and murdered on the same day that he had a fight with his white “boss” at the cotton compress. He exchanged angry words and walked away from his shift. He disappeared that very night and his mutilated and virtually decapitated body was found on a country road along the border between Perry and Hale Counties. A death certificate was filed on May 4, 1979 (see Figure 6). It certifies the following: Sammie Lee Johnson died on May 4, 1979. He is a Black Male, 25 years old, who was born on January 7, 1954. He was never married. The Immediate Cause of Death was “Fractured Skull” and “Other internal Injuries.” An autopsy was made but was “not complete” and the cause of death remained “undetermined” (the choices were listed as accident, suicide, homicide). Sherrill N. Kirk, Dallas County Coroner, signed the death certificate. It was registered, without further details, by Doris L. Hughes on August 7, 1979. The funeral director, Elijah Rollins, who prepared Johnson’s mutilated body for viewing and burial, told Veit that Johnson was surely the victim of the local KKK, but he just did his best and never reported the crime. “It would be foolhardy,” he said, to do so.

Around the same time, the body of Willie Nichols, a buddy of Johnson, washed up from the banks of the Alabama River in Selma. His name is listed as a “civil rights martyr” in the Selma civil rights museum archives. But Nichols’ death records could not be found. The helpful Selma library archivist said that it appeared that all of Nichols’ records seemed to have “disappeared.” Relatives registered complaints but neither of the executions was ever investigated, let alone prosecuted, by the Office of the Attorney General for the Southern District of Alabama, despite the claims of relatives. And these three cases, stumbled upon by us—Ethel Brookes, Sammie Lee Johnson, and Willie Nichols—are only the tip of the iceberg, according to civil rights records and local histories of the victims’ families.[456]

Figure 6: Death Certificate of Sammie Lee Johnson, May 4, 1979.