Jeff Sessions Addresses Sheriffs...Goes Full KKK Grand Lizard

February 15, 2018 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

Trump’s Attorney General Jeff Sessions left his white hood and robe at home when he addressed an association of U.S. sheriffs on Monday in Washington, DC, but that didn’t stop him from going full-on Klukker and praising the single law enforcement institution most connected to America’s history of brutal oppression of Black people, Mexicanos and Native Americans:

I want to thank every sheriff in America. Since our founding, the independently elected sheriff has been the people's protector, who keeps law enforcement close to and accountable to people through the elected process... The office of sheriff is a critical part of the Anglo-American heritage of law enforcement...We must never erode this historic office.

Grand Lizard Sessions says that the sheriff has been “the people’s protector.” NO—it has been the protector of those with power and privilege and an instrument of terror against the oppressed, while drawing backward sections of the people into carrying out that terror. But it sure as hell is part of the “Anglo-American heritage”—the white supremacist history—of this country, which was founded on enslavement of Black people and genocide against Native Americans, justified by the supposed “superiority” of white people, and enforced by whips, chains, and guns, by rape and murder. This “Anglo-American” heritage continues and is viciously carried out to this day.

In the U.S., the forerunners of the sheriffs were slave patrols. First set up by the county courts in South Carolina in 1704, these were “roving bands of armed white citizens who would stop, question, and punish slaves caught without a permit to travel.” In 1850 the federal Fugitive Slave Act gave sheriffs the authority to hunt down runaway slaves in the free states and return them to the slavemasters.

In the U.S., sheriffs have a very important power—known as posse comitatus—to “deputize” and arm civilians to hunt down “criminals.” Those “deputized” were often racist whites, and these posses often targeted Black, Latino or Native American people, as happened in 1919, in Elaine, Arkansas, when Black sharecroppers attempted to organize a union:

The planters also mobilized. Sheriff Frank Kitchens deputized a massive white posse ... Hundreds of white veterans, recently returned from military service in France, flocked to the courthouse. Dividing into small groups, the armed white men set out into the countryside to search for the sharecroppers. The posse believed that a black conspiracy to murder white planters had just been begun and that they must do whatever it took to put down the alleged uprising. The result was the killing of 237 African Americans.

The racist reactionary role of sheriffs continued into modern times. In vast rural areas, sheriffs are a law unto themselves, often meting out “rough justice,” or letting people off for a bribe.

In the cities, no better.  It was Sheriff Jim Clark who organized the mob that, together with police, savagely beat civil rights marchers crossing Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma Alabama in 1965. It was Sheriff Joe Arpaio who for decades carried out massive racial profiling of Latinos in Arizona, even setting up what he proudly called a “concentration camp” for immigrants, where many died. And it was the fascist Wisconsin Sheriff David Clarke who called for intensified surveillance of Muslim people and spoke at the Republican National Convention that nominated Trump.

In the middle of Black History Month, Grand Lizard Sessions spoke to an audience of swaggering pigs (a.k.a. sheriffs). He drew upon a past of legalized racist brutality to point to the future he and the rest of the fascist Trump/Pence regime are intent on bringing into being: making American White again. They must not be allowed to do so.

Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution

Send us your comments.

If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.