Bishop's Gambit

Over the past few months, as Donald Trump was indicted, booked, fingerprinted, tried and then convicted on 34 felony counts, his campaign has been sadly pushing an incredibly racist argument that these convictions would only make him more relatable to African American voters.

And when most people reacted as though this were ludicrous, the Trump campaign responded by posting completely real, not remotely fake images of Trump laughing it up with all his many, many black friends.

Today, as the Washington Post’s Philip Bump has helpfully detailed here, Dan Bishop — a Republican congressman who’s running for state attorney general in North Carolina — has stepped up the insanity by claiming that New York City’s prosecution of Donald Trump is exactly the same thing as Alabama’s prosecutions of African Americans back in 1950:

“I do believe that the people who are engaging in selective prosecution, vindictive prosecution, using it, doing it — and when I say it’s rigged, it’s not just they don’t go into a fair fight. They go into a place where they know the fight is unfair,” he said. “It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950, where if you’re— if a person happened to be Black, in order to get justice. And that’s what they did in New York.”

Yeah, no.

For starters, we should remember that many African Americans in Alabama never even got to have a trial in the first place, as the most prevalent form of justice meted out to blacks in the state was the vigilante violence of lynching.

For instance, in 1950 in Alabama — Dan Bishop’s exact reference — a 22-year-old African American veteran named Hilliard Brooks was reported to local police for causing a disturbance on a segregated bus. The police shot him.

And there are, of course, countless other instances of such lynchings across the South in the rest of that decade, most notably Emmett Till’s murder in Mississippi, and well beyond that too.

For those African Americans who were lucky enough to make it to trial, things were even worse.

I’m currently writing about the protests in Selma, Alabama, and one thing I found was that the local “Circuit Solicitor” — a prosecutor who covered a state judicial circuit, which covered several counties — so regularly and so recklessly sought the death penalty for minor transgressions in the 1950s that he managed to make national headlines three times in three years.

In 1956, Solicitor Blanchard McLeod prosecuted a 21-year-old black man on a charge of “burglary with intent to rape” the daughter of Selma’s mayor. The woman did not recognize the man as her assailant, but police nevertheless drew a confession from him after ten days of constant and brutal interrogation at the local jail. McLeod secured the death penalty, but the Supreme Court overturned the sentence on appeal due to the circumstances of the “confession.”

In 1958, the same Alabama prosecutor sought the death penalty in another case involving a black man accused of raping a young white woman; he too was convicted, but it came out at a clemency hearing that the 19-year-old and 17-year-old couple had long been having a consensual affair but the young woman panicked when it was discovered.

That same year, that same prosecutor pursued a third death penalty charge, this time against a middle-aged black handyman who had allegedly robbed an elderly white woman of … one dollar and ninety five cents. Despite the small sum, McLeod again convinced the jury that execution by electrocution was warranted because the victim claimed he had tried to choke and rape her. The sentence sparked an international scandal, leading Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to reach out to the governor to urge clemency for the sake of Cold War propaganda alone.

Again, that’s just one circuit solicitor in a single part of the state that had probably 50,000 residents, roughly half of whom were black.

The judge in these cases was equally racist, and the juries, of course, were too.

In this era, most counties in Alabama had few or no registered black voters and therefore they had few if any black members serving on juries. (I’m writing about the trials of Viola Liuzzo’s murderers in Lowndes County right now, and I learned that there had never been a black juror in the county before the Voting Rights Act.) Also, local laws banned women from serving too, so these juries were only made up of white men with the typical racial attitudes of their time and place.

So … no, I don’t think Donald Trump has it as bad as African Americans had it in Alabama in the 1950s, because (a) he wasn’t gunned down in the street, (b) he was in fact tried by a jury of his peers, and (c) he’s not going to be sent to the goddamn electric chair.

Otherwise, a brilliant comparison by Dan Bishop. The good people of North Carolina should absolutely make him their attorney general because this man is a legal genius.