February 7, 2002
A Judge's Past
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.
--
Doubt.
Doubt thyself.
Doubt even if thou doubtest thyself.
Doubt all.
Doubt even if thou doubtest all.
It seems sometimes as if beneath all conscious doubt
there lay some deepest certainty. O kill it! Slay the
snake!
The horn of the Doubt-Goat be exalted
Dive deeper, ever deeper, into the Abyss of Mind,
until thou unearth the fox THAT. On, hounds!
Yoicks! Tally-ho! Bring THAT to bay!
Then, wind the Mort!
Uncle Al. the kiddies pal
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