A Judge's Past
The New York Times
February 7, 2002
By BOB HERBERT
I never had any contact with
the Sovereignty
Commission."
That's what Charles W. Pickering
told the Senate Judiciary
Committee at a hearing that
preceded his appointment to the
federal bench in 1990.
The problem with that statement is that it doesn't appear
to be true.
The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission was a grotesque,
hateful, virulently anti-black organization established by
the state of Mississippi in the mid-1950's to take whatever
steps were necessary to maintain segregation and the
privileges of white supremacy in the wake of the Brown v.
Board of Education ruling outlawing segregation in the
public schools.
The commission harassed black people, undermined
efforts to secure voting rights, spied on civil rights leaders
and infiltrated civil rights and labor organizations. Among
other things, it helped screen potential trial jurors for
Byron De La Beckwith, who murdered the civil rights
leader Medgar Evers in 1963.
The commission was still doing its dirty work when Mr.
Pickering served in the State Senate in the 1970's. But
when Mr. Pickering was selected by President George
Bush the First to fill a District Court seat in 1990 he not
only denied any contact with the commission, he said that
when he was a state senator it "had, in effect, been
abolished for a number of years."
That certainly wasn't true.
This is relevant now because Judge Pickering has been
nominated by President George Bush the Second to a seat
on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. It's a
critically important appointment. The Fifth Circuit, based
in New Orleans, covers the states of Louisiana, Mississippi
and Texas. It's the poorest circuit in the country and more
than 40 percent of the inhabitants are ethnic minorities.
Judge Pickering, a close friend of Senator Trent Lott, is a
right-winger whose views over many decades have been
insensitive, and frequently hostile, to the rights of
minorities, the disenfranchised, the poor and women. Mr.
Pickering is to appear today before the Senate Judiciary
Committee to discuss his record. Civil rights and abortion
rights groups are mobilizing to block his confirmation.
Mr. Pickering had a significant effect on his home state's
racist past as early as 1959 when he was a student at the
University of Mississippi Law School. He felt it was
important to bolster Mississippi's anti-miscegenation law.
A marriage between a black person and a white person
was a felony, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. But
Mr. Pickering recognized there was a loophole in the law
that could allow some interracial couples to fall in love and
marry without being arrested and sent off to prison. He
wrote an article in The Mississippi Law Journal explaining
how the law could be fixed.
The state legislature took his advice, amending the law
the very next year.
Mr. Pickering's claim that he had had no contact with the
notorious Sovereignty Commission seemed pretty dubious
when the commission's previously sealed records were
released a few years ago. People for the American Way,
one of the groups fighting Judge Pickering's nomination,
noted that in 1972 and 1973 he voted as a state senator to
appropriate money to cover expenses of the commission.
The records included memos showing that he had asked
to be kept apprised of the commission's information
regarding a group promoting workers' rights in Laurel,
Judge Pickering's hometown.
Throughout his career Judge Pickering has been
antagonistic to the voting rights guaranteed by the 14th
Amendment and the federal Voting Rights Act. After the
debacle in Florida in 2000, one would think that a
commitment to the protection of voting rights would be a
prerequisite for anyone being considered for appointment
to the federal bench.
But that idea is quickly trumped by the simple fact that
President Bush was the beneficiary of the Florida debacle.
Some things never change. Mr. Pickering's nomination is
an affront to black people from coast to coast. But in a
Bush White House, when civil rights come up against the
Republican right, it's not even a close call.
Judge Pickering's racist past, his problematic present and
his apparent difficulties with the truth have not been
enough to persuade the president to reel in this
nomination.
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