"Her intentions were never to divide during her whole life,” Alveda King said of her aunt, Coretta Scott King. | Getty Martin Luther King's niece accuses Warren of playing 'the race card'

Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece on Wednesday accused Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren of trying to “stir up” emotions and “play the race card” by invoking the King family name during a Senate floor speech Tuesday.

Senate Republicans voted along party lines late Tuesday to silence Warren for impugning another senator, a violation of Senate rules. During a lengthy floor speech expressing her opposition to Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions’ nomination to head the Justice Department, Warren had read aloud a letter that Coretta Scott King had sent to the Senate in 1986, when the chamber was debating whether to confirm Sessions to a lifetime appointment on the federal bench.


“It’s almost like a bait and switch. Stir up their emotions, use the name of King — and my name is Alveda King — stir up people’s emotions, play the race card, which she was attempting to do,” Alveda King, an anti-abortion activist and Fox News contributor who voted for President Donald Trump, told Fox Business Network.

Warren was warned before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell moved to rebuke her by silencing her from the Senate floor, although some Democrats in her absence were able to read the letter from the Senate floor without incident. The liberal firebrand took to the internet to finish her reading of Scott King’s letter, in which she had written that “Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.”

In interviews Wednesday, Warren held up the letter as a powerful note that everyone should read, especially, she said, Republicans.

“I don’t think voters are asking us to ignore facts. I don’t think voters are asking us to say, you know, we’re just gonna ignore what this man did to black citizens because it’s not only the black citizens,” she told CNN. “The speech also talked about what he’s done with immigrants, with women. The real question for an attorney general of the United States is whether or not he can be trusted in the hours when you can’t review what he does? Can he be trusted to do two things: to stand up strongly on behalf of everyone — not just those he agrees with, but everyone — and, secondly, does he have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to the president of the United States when the president issues an illegal and unconstitutional order? Those are the jobs of the attorney general of the United States.”

King described her aunt, and family at large, as “a peace maker.” And she suggested if Scott King were alive today, she would endorse Sessions’ record for having worked to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan and desegregate public schools.

“Her intentions were never to divide during her whole life,” King said, noting that she served as her communications and correspondence secretary for years. “And so in that letter, she would be referring to perhaps some of his comments. However, she would agree today that he of course ended some school desegregation, he worked to prosecute members of the KKK. Aunt Coretta was a very reasonable woman and she, with integrity, would have noted that he had done some great work in fighting against discrimination.”

