NAACP President Cornell William Brooks, along with five other civil rights advocates, were arrested on Tuesday during a sit-in to protest the nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General in the upcoming Trump administration. The group occupied Sessions’ Senate office in Alabama as a form of protest, demanding Sessions withdraw from consideration over controversial statements he allegedly made in the past.
Brooks spoke to Democracy Now after he was released from jail following his arrest where he outlined his chief concerns with Sessions as Attorney General, saying they were threefold.
Brooks claimed Sessions has “demonstrated an unwillingness to acknowledge the reality of voter suppression that we have seen from one end of the country to the other” Rather, he argued Sessions has “mouthed faith in voter ID laws, premised on voter fraud.”
Secondly, Brooks says Sessions “is one—among one of the most conservative, ultraconservative, extremist senators” when it come to immigration.
Finally, Brooks says he objects to Sessions “views on criminal justice reform” and they “stand in stark contrast to both red state and blue state governors.” He added, he thinks Sessions is a “Nixonian and draconian” law and order type who “wants to overpopulate continue to overpopulate the prisons and jails, while depopulating our families and communities.”
He concluded, it was the NAACP’s belief that an “Attorney General Jeff Sessions, under a President Donald J. Trump, would take us in the wrong direction—that is to say, backward in a headlong and a full-speed fashion.”
Brooks then went on to say the NAACP is “unapologetically opposed to Senator Sessions” . . . and the NAACP Board is “encouraging civil disobedience, that is to say, standing in the tradition of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, standing in that tradition by sitting down.”
In other words, Brooks appears to be expressing the view that the NCAAP is planing additional civil disobedience actions throughout the Trump cabinet nomination process.
[image via screengrab]
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
