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US Attorney General Jeff Sessions III and his supporters enjoy taking credit for his role in the conviction of KKK members in Alabama who killed an African-American teenager in 1981.

But is “allowing” and “not obstructing” the same as taking an active role?

The answer obviously is no. Sessions, as it turns out, actually tried to get the primary investigator to stop working on the case.

Much is written about how Jeff Sessions, as the US attorney in the Southern District of Alabama in the early 1980’s, helped convict two members of the Ku Klux Klan in the lynching of a 19-year-old African-American man named Michael Donald. It was a brutal and senseless crime that left the teen’s battered, sliced and bloody body tied to a tree.

KKK Lynching Convictions

One of the men convicted in the murder, Henry Francis Hays, was sentenced to death. He sat on death row for several years. Then on 6 June 1997, Hays was strapped into an electric chair and electrocuted. He was the first member of the Ku Klux Klan to be convicted of murdering a Black man in the 20th Century, and the only member of the Ku Klux Klan to be put to death for murdering a Black man since 1913, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Another man was convicted in the murder. James Llewellyn “Tiger” Knowles rolled over on the other KKK members and gave testimony against Hays, receiving a life sentence in exchange. Then later, on 18 May 1989, a third man was convicted as an accomplice. Mobile County Circuit Court judge Michael Zoghby sentenced Benjamin Franklin Cox, Jr. to life in prison for his role in the race-inspired murder of Michael Donald.

Police investigators in Alabama “investigated” all sorts of ridiculous leads before a realistic investigation into the KKK-orchestrated murder of Michael Donald was initiated. An article by The Atlantic relates:

“Montgomery police disregarded the possibility that Donald had been lynched. Instead they pursued theories that Donald had been sleeping with a white co-worker at the Mobile Press-Register, where he worked part-time, and had been killed in retaliation. Cops told reporters that Donald had been murdered in a drug deal gone bad, and arrested three men who were later found to have nothing to do with the case.”

It Gets Worse

Police claimed that the brutal lynching death had “nothing to do with race.” The Atlantic published the “official” response, “three junkies had killed this lowlife black man who thought he could take drugs from them and not pay.” Then, after the Donald family attorney, the brother of Thomas Figures, State Senator Michael Figures, suggested that racist “extremists” could have killed the teen, he was accused of “stirring up racism,” according to an LA Times article published in 1989. Then police investigators suggested that Donald had a secret criminal life as a hustler and drug dealer, none of which was true.

Bob Eddy, a criminal investigator in the Donald case, told The Atlantic, “You just have to know the climate in those times, most of those guys who were law enforcement, not all of them, but most of those guys, a lot of those guys, they didn’t care if you killed a black guy.”

The conviction was a major blow to the KKK without a doubt. But a close review and a few key interviews, suggest that Sessions has taken too much credit for a prosecution that he actually didn’t even support until it became politically convenient to do so.

The Man Who Made it Happen

A preacher’s son, Thomas Figures, the first black Assistant District Attorney in Mobile County, spent four years as an Assistant U.S. Attorney under then-Senator Jeff Sessions. He was unique as a strong Democrat employed by a far-right politician like Sessions. He confirms in an article by The Atlantic, What Jeff Sessions’s Role in Prosecuting the Klan Reveals About His Civil-Rights Record, that Sessions had not, “obstructed the investigation of the murder of Michael Donald.”

However, he does say that Sessions, “tried to persuade me to discontinue pursuit of the case.” Figures said Sessions “remarked, with regard to the investigation, that the case was a waste of time, that it wasn’t going anywhere, that I should spend more time on other things, and that, if the perpetrators were found, I would not be assigned to the case.” Only when the case went before the grand jury, Figures told the Senate, and became more promising, did Sessions change his attitude about the prosecution.

Figures also accused Sessions of calling him “boy” and criticizing him for the way he addressed “white folks” and while Sessions strongly denies having made either statement, that accusation never went away.

Figures also served as a municipal judge during his distinguished career. He passed away in 2015.

Session’s Rejection

Sarah Wildman writes about Jeff Sessions’s expectation to be nominated to the federal bench under the Reagan Administration in 1986 in the 2009 article, Jeff Sessions’s chequered past, published by the Guardian. It didn’t happen. Instead, Sessions became one of only two men in 50 years to be rejected by the Senate judiciary committee. Sessions, who was 39 at the time, was a US attorney for the Southern District of Alabama.

Wildman cites Senator Ted Kennedy’s announcement that it was “inconceivable … that a person of this attitude is qualified to be a US attorney, let alone a United States federal judge.” Kennedy later remarked that the hearings created a ”clear and convincing case to gross insensitivity to the questions of race” in reference to Sessions. Ohio Senator Howard Metzenbaum, said Sessions’s had ”marginal qualifications”.

He also said the Alabama US attorney lacked “judicial temperament” and described him as a nominee “who is hostile, hostile to civil rights organizations and their causes.”

Sessions denied all allegations hinting of racism, and called allegations of formerly supporting the KKK “damnably false.”