Douglas Alexander: “I have been mystified, since I am not a member of the Judiciary Committee, by the treatment of Judge Pickering of…”

“I have been mystified, since I am not a member of the Judiciary Committee, by the treatment of Judge Pickering of Mississippi and Attorney General Bill Pryor of Alabama. I do not know Judge Pickering. I have met him briefly only twice. My staff and I studied his record. I have heard insinuations and words that were carefully chosen by the other side to suggest he was guilty of not being sensitive on racial issues. Yet when I looked into his record, I discovered, quite to the contrary. He had been living in Laurel, MS. In 1967, just to cite one example, he had testified in public against the leader of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which were the closest thing we had to terrorists in the United States of America in the last half century--an act of courage. So here is a man who throughout his whole life was far out front on issues of race relations.”