Jim Simons : Judge Bill Kilgarlin Was a Different Kind of Friend

Judge William Wayne Kilgarlin. Image from the Tarlton Law Library, University of Texas at Austin.
Bill Kilgarlin:
A different kind of friend

On the Texas Supreme Court he showed his values and commitments had not changed and Texas was better for it.

By Jim Simons / The Rag Blog / November 15, 2012

It seems like most of my contributions to The Rag Blog have been inspired by the death of someone I knew and who had an influence on my life. So here we go again.

The day before the national election former Supreme Court of Texas Judge Bill Kilgarlin died in New Mexico. He had been one of the best judges to serve on that court during my professional life, nearly 50 years. He wrote decisions recognizing and defining some much needed law around the Bad Faith doctrine, which gave a consumer a cause of action against an insurance company that acted in bad faith to decline or try to underpay benefits, standard practice.

So of course the insurance companies put up big bucks to beat him and all the other people-oriented judges on the Texas Supreme Court, making it one of the worst high courts among the states. They proceeded to undo the law and create one of the more calcified, business-oriented courts to be found anywhere. And so it has continued for the last 25 or 30 years. No Democrat has been elected to it in many years.

This history is probably Bill’s legacy. But to me he was a jovial companion, onetime roommate in law school, and perhaps, above all, a big -- literally and figuratively -- player in two activities that stand above most of the stops along my way. One was scholastic debate and the other was the Young Democrats.

When I met Bill in the late 1950’s he was coaching debate at the University of Houston. It was probably at the Tulane college debate tournament where my colleague (as we called our partners in competition) and I, representing SMU, met the UH team in the final debate. The Kilgarlin-coached team beat us for the big trophy but I left New Orleans with a new friend. Shortly afterwards he was elected to the Texas House of Represntatives.

All of the time I knew Bill he was never so impressed with his status (he accomplished much and was well recognized for it) that he changed in how he related to friends. Nor was he reserved in sharing a pitcher of beer or celebrating an election victory. There was once a radio program called “Just Plain Bill” and it could have referred to Kilgarlin.

One example of this occurred on a steamy night in the summer of 1960. I had been in Houston with two old friends from high school days, swilling beer and carrying on, when I got into a serious argument (over money) with the guy in whose car we came to Houston. Long story short, he left me on the side of the road on South Main in a mosquito-patrolled ditch. Worse, I was broke and it was light years before cell phones.

In my beer-saturated state I could only wonder what I could do. I hardly knew anyone in Houston even if I could somehow find a phone number and call for help. I went across the street to a seedy motel where a compassionate clerk allowed me to use the phone directory and his phone to call Bill Kilgarlin. Without hesitation he came and picked me up.

I stayed over in the house where he was staying, his parents’ modest home. I was able to clear my brain and took nourishment. And to my shock, Bill offered to take me back to Austin in his incredible classic Rolls Royce, or whatever the thing was.

I thought of the guys who abandoned me in a ditch and of Kilgarlin -- two different kinds of friends. He was still a member of the legislature at that time but he loved a good party and we found several in Austin in the next few days.

The atmosphere of that time among Austin liberals is captured perfectly in Bill Brammer’s classic novel, The Gay Place. I don’t remember a character one might have recognized as affable, fun loving Bill Kilgarlin, but surely he was the inspiration for some of Brammer’s Austin partiers.

After a split in the Young Democrats, Bill Kilgarlin (left), then a Harris County State Representative, and Jim Simons confer at the University YMCA. Photo by Hyatt. Image from the Daily Texan, fall of 1959.
One thing Bill loved to do at Scholz Beer Garten was to stand on a table and bellow out operatic arias or drinking songs. His refrain would reverberate thoughout the legendary Austin watering hole. In the late fall of 1960, Kilgarlin and I combined with two other friends in law school to rent a big old house right behind Scholz’s.

Beginning in 1959 when I came to the University of Texas and Bill was in law school, we were on the same side in the factional battling of the Young Democrats. We were solidly aligned with the more liberal group that statewide included Oscar Mauzy, David and Ann Richards, and many other stalwart folks such as Austin’s new tax assessor-collector Bruce Elfant’s parents, Martin and Eileen Elfant.

In so many ways, it was a fantastic group of political people and for the next five years we caroused and schmoozed both at YD functions and in bars across the state of Texas. Both Kilgarlin and I served as statewide YD officers in those years. Only in the much more serious and purposeful days of the Movement later, in the ‘60s, would I ever be that close to a group of like-minded people.

I would have a hell of a time picking which association was more fun. Like Emma Goldman, my revolution must allow dancing. I thought then that those people, with whom so many all-night strategizing sessions and all-day beer parties had illuminated my young life, would forever be my dear comrades.

But the day did come when I had to leave a meeting of liberals in 1967, the Democrats of Texas, because they were too weak-kneed or determined to avoid a subject that could diminish their chances of electing a Governor, to take a stand on principle and condemn the war in Vietnam. My friend and brother in the Movement (then new to us) Martin Wiginton and I walked out and left behind some of our best friends and allies of past political skirmishes.

It was the beginning of new strategy with new younger allies on the anti-war and civil rights fronts. New and just as deep, or deeper, bonds would be forged in the ensuing years. A radical vision and more determined assault awaited.

Bill Kilgarlin was about seven years older than me and he never left the so-called mainstream of liberal politics except, some argue, to compromise himself to then-Governor Dolph Briscoe and get himself appointed to a district judgeship in Houston around 1976. Later on the Texas Supreme Court he showed his values and commitments had not changed and Texas was better for it.

I hardly saw him at all over the last couple of decades. He moved to Santa Fe after being defeated in the special interest coup d'état of the Texas courts by the forces of darkness. Whenver I did see Kilgarlin, it was like there had been no gulf of time between us. He was as friendly and engaging as he was at the Tulane debate tournament of 1958, or in the Young Democrat wars and parties or as my roommate in that house far too near to Scholz’s for me if I wanted to get through law school.

I am glad he enjoyed his privacy, his operas, and his wine for the last years of his life in New Mexico. Most of all, I am glad to have known him.

[Jim Simons practiced law in Austin for 40 years, representing many movement activists, including anti-war GIs. Jim served as a counsel for members of the American Indian Movement who were arrested at Wounded Knee in 1974. After he retired he published his memoir Molly Chronicles in 2007. Read more articles by Jim Simons on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : On Being 'Outed' as an American Indian

Tribal secrets:
Carrying the freight of being an Indian

Being outed as an American Indian changed my professional life, starting with an overnight 20 point drop in my IQ.

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2010

Steve Russell will be Thorne Dreyer's guest on Rag Radio, Tuesday, January 12, 2-3 p.m. on KOOP 91.7 FM in Austin. They will discuss crime and punishment, the status of American Indians, the War in Afghanistan, and other issues facing progressives in 2010 America -- as well as Steve's experiences as a Sixties activist, a trial judge, an educator, and as a Cherokee Indian. For those outside the listening area, go here to stream the show.

What does it matter to be American Indian? I get that a lot from friends and faux friends.

Actually, when I got “outed” the reaction of my friends hurt more than the reaction of my enemies. I was an elected official, and all elected officials who do anything have enemies. Since I was an elected official to change the world rather than to have a job, I did quite a bit. So I had quite a few enemies.

I was outed when the Austin newspaper carried a story about some lobbying I had done for the Texas Indian Bar Association. Judges lobby all the time, although we seldom call it what it is. The ethical rubric is “efforts to improve the administration of justice.”

I had in the past lobbied for a probation option in petty misdemeanor theft cases, for the power to confiscate a car in subsequent offense DWI cases, against parental notification of abortions, and for any number of legislative efforts sponsored by the Texas Council on Family Violence.

In this case, I had been noticed lobbying for legislation to put dead Indians back in the ground when they get dug up, just like we do with dead white people. I fought that fight for 12 years, six legislative sessions, without success, in spite of the consistent support of then-Senator Gonzalo Barrientos.

It was a losing battle. Now, as then, there are more dead Indians on Texas campuses as “scientific data” than there are live Indians as students.

While the battle was lost, the effort did me no political harm. After all, the rap put on Indians who demand the respect other human beings take for granted is that we are anti-intellectuals. We have been explicitly called “book burners” because Indian bones, don’t you know, can be read by physical anthropologists to tell us about the human past. This is only the case with Indian bones because white people came to the Americas so recently. The fact that white people will not stand for having their dead disturbed is… coincidence.

Whatever the merits, most of our statewide officeholders are living proof that anti-intellectualism is not a political liability in Texas. Still, being outed as an American Indian changed my professional life, starting with an overnight 20 point drop in my IQ. Lawyers were suddenly explaining things to me in court you would not have to explain to a first year law student.

A truly bizarre incident stemming from that news story involved an elderly gentleman who tracked me down at the courthouse to object to the fact I held public office -- because “Indians don’t pay taxes.” While I was finally able to convince him that this Indian has paid taxes since joining the military at age 17, he was still of the opinion that the only reason I did so was that I was too damn dumb to claim my “exemption.”

I had never hidden my tribal ties but never advertised them either. My wives and girlfriends knew, and I’m pretty sure most of the people who worked with me on The Rag knew because I was always interested in coverage of Indian issues.

After my outing, even people I had known for years reevaluated my intellect. My enemies decided that I had dredged up a fake past to play the affirmative action card. This in spite of the facts that I was born in raised in Oklahoma and that I never said a word about my ethnicity to any of the schools I attended except to request a graduation notice sent to the tribal newspaper.

The reason I never brought it up is that, while I support affirmative action as policy, I would not touch it with a 10 foot pole in my own life. I did not want the stigma, but it turns out I could not escape the stigma anyway.

In both of my academic appointments during my second career, I was admonished about publishing “Indian stuff.” It was really clear that I was wanted because I was a judge, not because I was Indian.

Now I’m retired in Sun City, Texas, and all that is behind me, right? Not exactly. In the gym I need to visit every day for my health, I find a goddam cigar store Indian. The first time I saw it, I got an immediate knot in my stomach, and it’s not gotten much better since. I wanted to retire but I’m going to have to make a stink.

I can play all the stuff I am in for like a jukebox: no offense is intended, it’s just an historical artifact (in a gym?), and, anyway, I’m part Indian (which part? Obviously, not the heart). I haven’t been here a month yet and I keep stalling the opening salvos in a battle that would not happen even for a black man. Can you imagine if it were a lawn jockey?

What does it matter to be an American Indian? It does not matter at all if you are willing to hide your ethnicity, something not difficult in the Southwest. But if you are outed or you out yourself, I’ve learned that it’s not easy to carry the freight of the least successful ethnicity in politics, in education, and in life expectancy, which I guess is another way of saying that few of us live to retire and therefore I should not be shocked to find little regard for our existence in a retirement community.

You can’t retire from being who you are.

[Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment. He recently retired as an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University. His writing has been published widely; he is a columnist for Indian Country Today and a contributor to The Rag Blog. Steve was an activist in Austin in the Sixties and Seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. He lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin.]

Also see:

• Steve Russell, Indian : Advice to Myself at 14 by Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / May 28, 2009
• Steve Russell on Native Hawaiians: Got Indigenous? by Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / June 30, 2009
• Steve Russell : Let Us Now Praise (Not) Famous Women by Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2009.

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Judge Wiliam Wayne Justice : Hispanics and The Right to Vote

Top, Austin polling place. Photo by T hom / Flickr. Below, Judge William Wayne Justice. Photo from Dallas Morning News.
Judge Justice and single member districts:
Bringing voting power to all Texans

By George Korbel / The Rag Blog / October 27, 2009

[Judge William Wayne Justice was a Texas federal district judge who died at age 89 on Oct. 13, 2009, in Austin. His rulings on landmark class-action suits led to school integration in Texas, as well as sweeping prison reform, the education of undocumented immigrants and much more. David Richards wrote of his legacy in The Rag Blog. Attorney George Korbel now provides a lawyerly take on Judge Justice’s profound effect on voting rights in Texas.]

I came to Texas in late 1971. Since that time I have usually represented Hispanic plaintiffs. Oscar Mauzy had driven up to Tyler to file the case attacking the 1971 House and State Senate redistricting. He then turned it over to David Richards. There was a concerted effort to remove Wayne Justice as the organizing judge. He hung tough and ended up on the panel.

His opinion in Graves v. Barnes affirmed as White v Regester was the first case in which the Supreme Court affirmed a finding of discrimination as a result of at-large elections. Four year later the findings in Graves/White formed the basis for the extension of the special provisions of the Federal Voting Rights Act to Texas. The Judge chronicled the decades of discrimination against Hispanics and litigation to redress it. And he explained how it all impacted the electoral process.

The litigation flowing from the Supreme Court affirmance of his Graves opinion sped up change in Texas. In 1971, all Texas cities and school districts elected their boards of trustees and councils at large which resulted in minimal Hispanic and virtually no African American representation. By the end of the decade, San Antonio, Houston, Dallas, Waco and a host of other cities and school districts were forced into single member districts as a result of Graves/White and the Federal Voting Rights Act.

Now virtually all of the urban areas in Texas, along with the rest of the South with the exception of Austin, elect by single member districts. Every person from every one of these jurisdictions has example after example of what changes were caused by geographic representation.

In San Antonio, every time it rained there were floods. Property was destroyed and people inevitably drowned. Virtually the first effort of the single member district city council was drainage and we have no floods now. The mother of the current mayor of San Antonio was one of the plaintiffs in the single member litigation. Such a simple concept as fair elections not only improved social and economic conditions but provided countless role models for the minority, the poor and the dispirited.

In a suit filed by David Richards, the judge issued first injunction enforcing Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Texas was going to purge all of the registered voters and start over from scratch in 1975. This would have been a major setback to minority voting. Fully eight million stamped sealed letters to all of our registered voters were stopped at the last moment.

Judge Justice’s impact on the expanded governmental use of the Spanish Language was likewise significant if less appreciated. His US v. Texas was a grand desegregation suit involving the entire state. An offshoot of that case was his opinion in the Del Rio school case tried by Warren Burnett in the early 1970s circa Graves/White. Judge Justice not only desegregated the schools but ordered bilingual education. Within a few years in one form or another it was common, controversial but common.

The decision in the Del Rio school case together with the Graves findings relating to problems of non-English speaking voters formed a significant part of the legislative history which resulted in the language provisions of the 1975 Voting Rights Act. Literally overnight, all election documents had to be translated into Spanish. People were allowed to vote in a language that only years earlier they had been punished for speaking in school. The success of elections in turn eventually led to the translation of virtually all forms that people have to fill out to obtain benefits from the state.

So many children have benefited from learning in Spanish. So many elections have been won and the benefits of government shared as a result. Though I was not all that close to him, some years ago I had a long chat with him at a reception in his honor in Del Rio where he often sat after moving to Austin. The questions he asked showed how interested he was in the language issues and the types of changes that had come about from single member districts. I ticked off a laundry list of the changes that I had seen. Finally I told him, “Judge, you started all of that.”

[George Korbel is a prominent attorney who specializes in voting rights issues. His offices are in San Antonio.]

Also see David Richards : The Judge Who Brought Justice to Texas by David Richards / The Rag Blog / October 22, 2009

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David Richards : The Judge Who Brought Justice to Texas

Justice William Wayne Justice. Photo by Michael O'Brien / School of Law / UT Austin

William Wayne Justice, Judge Who Remade Texas, Dies at 89

William Wayne Justice, a federal district judge who ruled on ground-breaking class-action suits that compelled Texas to integrate schools, reform prisons, educate illegal immigrants and revamp many other policies, died [October 13, 2009] in Austin. He was 89.
[….]
Judge Justice was a small-town lawyer active in Democratic Party politics when President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him to the federal bench of the Eastern District of Texas in 1968. Sitting in Tyler, Tex., he came to be called the most powerful man in Texas by those who agreed with his largely liberal decisions and the most hated by those who differed.

In a 1998 column in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Molly Ivins made what she called the “painfully obvious point” that Judge Justice had lived up to his name, saying he “brought the United States Constitution to Texas.”

The same year, Lino Graglia, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said in an interview with The Dallas Morning News, “He has wreaked more havoc and misery and injury to the people of Texas than any man in the last 25 years.”

-- Douglas Martin / New York Times

Judge William Wayne Justice:
A great and courageous man

By David Richards / The Rag Blog / October 22, 2009

Judge Justice’s death has produced an outpouring of admiration, all of it justified and understandable. He was a remarkable figure in the state’s history. The only thing I might add is a bit of historical perspective. I spent many hours in his court and come from the same Texas political generation. Indeed at one point we were friendly rivals for a vacancy on the Fifth Circuit that didn’t come our way, I have always assumed that for differing reasons, we were each too off the wall for the Carter administration.

The Judge grew up in East Texas-Henderson County. These roots are fundamental to understanding his career. He was one of that rare breed of East Texas liberals who opposed the racism that dominated Texas, especially East Texas, in that era. He practiced law in Athens with that great democrat and social renegade, Bill Kugle. The two of them were major activists in the Frankie Randolph-Ralph Yarborough wing of the democratic party, a wing that was decidedly anti-Lyndon Johnson in the 1950’s.

Johnson’s 1968 appointment of Justice to the federal bench has always struck me as a bit of a surprise given Johnson’s reputation for long memory. In all events the Judge hit the ground running, as the sitting federal judge in Tyler, Texas. His predecessor had been a defender of the conservative establishment and civil rights issues had not been welcome in his court.

In that time long hair seemed to threaten all school officials. Tyler Junior College prohibited beards and long hair on male students. In one of his early decisions Justice declared the rules unconstitutional. Shortly thereafter, in another case, he ordered the closing of the Black high school and integration of the students into the all-white schools of Tyler. Although this decision ultimately brought Earl Campbell, and a state football championship, that did nothing to assuage the anger of the white community.

These decisions insured that the Judge became from the get-go a total pariah in his home community, an animosity that endured throughout his life in Tyler. Paul Burka has written movingly on the subject of the ostracism and threats the Judge and his family faced in Tyler. This was not like a judge sitting in some urban metropolis where a degree of anonymity might be available, Judge Justice was exposed on a daily basis to the vitriol and somehow managed to maintain his equilibrium. Indeed his outside family was largely his staff and the young liberal law clerks who clamored for the opportunity to work for him.

In the not so secret world of lawyers, venue is frequently the linchpin of success in litigation. Where a case is tried may be the most important factor in outcome. In short order the handful of Texas civil rights lawyers began to beat a path to Tyler, where the Judge heard every case filed in federal court.

He issued landmark decisions on reform of the Texas juvenile justice system, the Texas prison system and the education of alien school children, to name just a few. Predictably, the Tyler docket became overcrowded and a new judge was assigned to hear a portion of the cases. We were forced to scramble a bit in our venue search; for a while one was assured of getting Judge Justice if you filed in Sherman, Texas, then that forum became uncertain. In my last filing before him I had to pursue the Judge to Paris, Texas, where for a short time he had the entire docket.

Most of my cases before the court involved voting rights, principally concerning the Black community. Judge Justice played a key role in the establishment of single member district representation in the Texas Legislature and in city councils and school boards across the state. In the early 1970’s I filed a series of cases in East Texas challenging city and county election systems. It was my first real exposure to the isolation and victimization of the rural black community of the State.

As a result of Judge Justice’s rulings we had some successes. A Black County Commissioner was elected in Nacogdoches; he was believed to be the first Black elected official since reconstruction in that part of the world. Some other victories followed in Palestine and Lufkin. The striking thing to me was the realization that throughout the East Texas Black community Judge Justice was viewed almost like a Messiah. While he was an anathema to the white establishment, he gave to the beleaguered Black world hope that they had never enjoyed before. Things were never the same again in East Texas.

Wayne Justice was a great and courageous man who chose a lonely and difficult path, and pursued it with good humor and intelligence.

[David Richards is a renowned Texas civil rights lawyer and sometimes writer. He is the author of Once Upon a Time in Texas: A Liberal in the Lone Star State . He lives in Austin.]

See William Wayne Justice / Wikipedia

Read more about the death of Judge William Wayne Justice:

• Federal judge who shattered old Texas dies at 89 by April Castro / AP / Oct. 14, 2009
• Judge William Wayne Justice, RIP 1920-2009 / Grits for Breakfast / Oct. 18, 2009
• Justice recalled as barrier buster for less fortunate by R.G. Ratcliffe / Houston Chronicle / Oct. 19, 2009
• Justice for the Dispossessed: William Wayne Justice, 1920-2009 by Lou Dubose / Texas Observer / Oct. 19, 2009

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Steve Russell : Let Us Now Praise (Not) Famous Women

There's a little "Wonder Woman" in all women. Image from the Wonder Woman Museum.
Let us now praise women
And the roles they play in our lives

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / October 14, 2009

I just came from a reunion of the civil rights law firm in Austin, where I used to work. Most of our work involved the anti-war movement and the mainstream discrimination cases, although we did send two lawyers to help defend the avalanche of criminal cases that fell on the American Indian Movement after Wounded Knee II. One of my detractors once said, “the biggest risk you took at the Knee would be a paper cut.”

It’s true that I took no risks at the Knee and I would go farther and say I would not have. Demonstration is easy; organizing is hard, and waving guns at the guys who have all the guns is just plain dumb. That said, once the government dropped the proverbial load of bricks on AIM, AIM had to be defended because their complaints were just even if their tactics were wrong. But I digress.

The people I knew in the civil rights movement were the finest people I’ve known in my life, and at my age I’ve watched plenty of friends and family make the journey, so I know that I should not waste an opportunity to tell somebody how much they have meant to me.

As far as I knew, the firm reunion was put together by a couple of the name partners. At the reunion, I discovered something that should not have been a surprise. Much of the heavy lifting was done by one of several women who had been legal workers.

I got to thinking about her when the truth came out, and I’ve decided that it’s fitting to say some things about her without speaking her name. Here’s a woman who has all the skills to run a law office, with or without computers. She sings and plays piano and accordion. She has a working knowledge of constitutional law, and has forgotten more about medicine than I ever knew. That may be why her daughter has become a medical doctor.

Maybe she is Superwoman, but she represents nicely the women who were behind every campaign I had to run when I was an elected official. I am reminded of the time I didn’t have the money to pay for preparing a mailer and the day before it had to be done my home was suddenly full of women I had no recollection of meeting. It turned out I had met some of them. They appeared because somebody posted a notice on the bulletin board at the battered women’s shelter saying I had an opponent and needed help.

I suppose I got that outpouring from the shelter for two reasons. I had created domestic violence dockets on two different courts, and my opponent had obstructed my efforts on one of those courts. The judge running against me was later arrested for threatening his wife with a gun, but I have no way of knowing if anybody knew about his personal life.

Women were behind everything I’ve ever accomplished in my life. I was married to some of them, some worked for me, and some just helped me for their own reasons, but without them my legal career would not have happened the way it did. It appears to me that we men can’t beat women in academia, in the professions, or in making families the places where our children can feel safe and excel. Seems some men think the only way they can beat women is to beat them.

Men are, indeed, bigger and stronger than women in most cases. There is social science research that tells us women are as likely as men to resort to what is technically domestic violence. That is, they will throw a slap or a dish because they are just as likely as we are to be unskilled at conflict resolution. Violent women notwithstanding, it is the women who arrive in the emergency rooms and the morgues. This is true in the dominant culture and unfortunately it’s also true in our [Indian] cultures.

Domestic violence is not a sex-neutral problem. While some men bite dogs, dog bite is not a species-neutral problem. Domestic violence is our problem, we men, the ones with the size and often the military training.

While it is necessary to put wife beaters in jail, sometimes to keep the peace in the community, jail is not going to stop wife beating. What will stop it is when beating your wife means your fishing buddy doesn’t want to fish with you anymore. When beating your wife is an unadulterated mark of disgrace. When hurting the mother of your children brings you the shame you deserve.

If a judge expresses outrage toward a wife beater, the judge has to be expressing the values of the community, and the community has to be a place where no man, woman, or child will listen to excuses.

She started it. She didn’t have dinner ready on time. She called me a bad name. I’m not here to tell you your wife is perfect, but if you made a bad pick when you got married we have divorce courts for that. I guess you should be proud that everybody would say you are a perfect husband except when you beat her, right?

I can accept that the fact that I have been gifted with a great professional career by a bunch of anonymous women will not apply to everybody. I suppose I can even understand the people who, when I was pushing a female candidate in my tribal election, railed against “petticoat government.”

Habits die hard, although my understanding of Cherokee history matches Wilma Mankiller’s, as expressed in her autobiography: we used to have women leaders before the missionaries taught us that men are meant to run things.

If none of the things I’ve said match your life experience, let me try one more thing. Let me point out that for most of us, the first human touch we experience is by a woman, a midwife or a grandmother in that role. The last human touch we experience will be a woman, a hospice nurse or a sister in that role. In between, if we are lucky, we experience other loving touches from women that ought to give us pause before laying violent hands on them, or offering friendship to a man who does.

If you can come that far with me, let me offer one more suggestion as a privilege of my age: do not waste an opportunity to tell the women who have made your life better how much they mean to you.

[Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University. He is a contributor to The Rag Blog and is a columnist for Indian Country Today, where this article also appears. He lives in Bloomington and can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu.]

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Sen. Sessions : Alabama Hypocrite Would Sit in Judgment

Graphic: US News & World Report, June, 16, 1986.

Click on image to enlarge.

There is great irony here in the once rejected nominee [for federal judge] now trying to sharpen his claws on Judge Sotomayor. But she is lots tougher and sharper than Sessions could ever be, and is letting him claw away, as he loudly displays his lightweight duplicity and demagoguery.

By Larry Ray / The Rag Blog / July 14, 2009

The Republican Party's finest continue to exhibit just how sorry, brazen, and unprincipled many of them can be as questioning of Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor has gotten underway. One of the worst and most shameless of the GOP interrogators is Alabama junior senator, Jeff Sessions.

In 1986 Sessions himself sat in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee as a Reagan nominee for a federal judgeship, and was promptly rejected because of his history of racially insensitive remarks and a poor civil rights record. One of those questioning Sessions was Senator Edward Kennedy who even back in 1986 called him "a throwback to a shameful era."

Today, after 23 years of playing the good old boy politician, becoming a U.S. Senator in 1997, Sessions, who switched from the Democratic to the Republican party, was assigned to be the Ranking Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee less than three months ago.

There is great irony here in the once rejected nominee now trying to sharpen his claws on Judge Sotomayor. But she is lots tougher and sharper than Sessions could ever be, and is letting him claw away, as he loudly displays his lightweight duplicity and demagoguery.

In his confrontational opening statement of the confirmation hearings for Sonia Sotomayor, Sessions, in his high nasal whine, he lectured the nominee about 'prejudice' in the legal system.

Twenty years ago when Sessions sat before the very panel he now heads, he was asked about well documented reports of his publicly recognized racism. His response, "I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or Communist, but I meant no harm by it."

Sessions allegedly referred to the (NAACP) and the (ACLU) as "un-American" and "Communist inspired" because they "forced civil rights down the throats of people." At his confirmation hearings, Sessions said that the groups could be un-American when "they involve themselves in un-American positions" in foreign policy.

Sessions had been frequently accused of "gross insensitivity” on racial issues by his detractors. Among a variety of blatant racial comments his opponents pointed to, was his joking reference to the Ku Klux Klan which he said "was not so bad until he found out that some of them smoked marijuana." Sessions, with a straight face, claimed his remarks were made in jest.

The panel didn't buy it, and rejected him. One of those voting against him was Alabama Democratic Senator Howell Heflin.

Today Republican Senator Sessions is but one more example of GOP leadership tinged with documented hate, racism, anti immigration xenaphobia, and unrealistic conservative dreams of "keeping things like they have always been."

The almost certain approval of Judge Sotomayor will, indeed, not be the way things have always been. That is the point of President Obama's having nominated her to the join the ranks of what has historically been the dominion of white men only, with only recent minor exceptions.

Meanwhile Senator Sessions may well be called into other hearings since he was one of of only nine opponents of Senator John McCain's anti-torture amendment. Sessions supports former Vice President Dick Cheney's proposal to exempt the (CIA) from any ban on the use of torture.

Session's is a real humanist too. Last month reportedly during testimony by a 42-year-old Filipino woman scheduled to be deported, the mother of two American children, who had been in the USA for 23 years, Sessions was clearly heard telling one one of his aides, "Enough with the histrionics," when the woman's 12-year-old son began crying during the testimony.

And now he lectures a Supreme Court nominee about "prejudice in the legal system."

The only thing more disgusting and upsetting than Sessions' troubling racist past are the voters out there who are nodding their heads in agreement with his "tough questioning."

[Retired journalist Larry Ray is a Texas native and former Austin television news anchor. He also posts at The iHandbill.]

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