The black-and-white television images of more than 50 years ago haven’t faded in my memory. Police beating peaceful civil rights protesters with their clubs, directing their German shepherd dogs straining at their leashes to attack black children and protesters being knocked down by gushing fire hoses. That was Birmingham in the early 1960s. In the center of it all was Theophilus Eugene Connor — “Bull” Connor, the commissioner of public safety. He personified authoritarian, brutal bigotry.
This week Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, standing before the Senate committee, is critical of the U.S. Justice Department interfering with local law enforcement. It’s not a principled stand for local control. It is the ghost of “Bull” Connor wrapping his arm around Sessions’ shoulders, whispering in his ear, “the South shall rise again.” It is the siren call of Jim Crow, of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s the roots of the live oak, reaching deep into the heart of a native son of the Old South, nourishing a long-parched organism that never died.
There are those who vouch for Sen. Sessions’ character. Take the word of Klansman David Duke, who included Sessions among those who represent “the first steps in taking America back” . . . to the days of segregation, of separate but equal and lynching.
Today Sessions wants his fellow Senators and the rest of the nation to see how he has changed, how he has evolved, that things he has said and done in the past are just faded images, nothing more than the kinescope remains of a time we’ve left behind. He’s wide-screen Jeff Sessions now, HD and in stark contrast, vivid in fine pixels (count them!) of depth and color so delicious you could almost swallow it.
Those decades past black and white images coming to our living room from hundreds of miles away were hard for me to watch. I wonder what the young Jeff Sessions saw in Birmingham and Selma, perhaps first hand, and whether he was as horror struck as I, or did his eyes light up with glee as he witnessed the bared white teeth of attacking dogs, smelled the tear gas, heard the blare of bullhorns or the sickening thud of batons on skulls. You form character traits at an early age, learning from those around you who hold community status. Regardless of what you might say when the spotlight glares, you retreat to the old familiar in quiet moments of refuge, when your first role models return as specters and wrap a deep tradition of a dark ideology around your shoulders, assuring you they will always be with you, and that you are in the right.