Senator Jeff Sessions begins confirmation hearings on Tuesday to become the next attorney general. Since President-elect Donald Trump nominated the Alabama Republican to the post in November, critics have resurrected old allegations that Sessions is racist. The allegations were first made in the 1980’s when Sessions was tapped for a federal judgeship in the Reagan administration, and they successfully scuttled his nomination then.
Nearly all of the allegations that Sessions is a racist stem from one man, Thomas Figures, who worked under him when Sessions was a U.S. Attorney in Alabama. On Monday, the Daily Beast rather sensationally revives accusations from Figures that Sessions initially tried to impede the U.S. Attorney’s office from getting involved in the prosecution of Henry Hays, a member of the Ku Klux Klan who abducted and lynched a young black man, Michael Donald, in 1981. (Sessions has long disputed Figures’s claims about the case.) This Atlantic piece on the Sessions controversy is chock full good reporting about the Donald lynching and even includes multiple paragraphs from sources who were involved crediting Sessions for helping the Hays prosecution to varying degrees. Nonetheless, the overall story is clearly contextualized to be unflattering to Sessions.
The exact truth may never be known, but it’s fair to say that Figures’s accusations are mostly hearsay, and when you drill down, his statements can be cagey and far from definitive. For instance, this is how Figures describes Sessions’s supposed signals not to pursue the Hays case: “All of these statements were well calculated to induce me to drop the case…On the other hand, none of them amounted to a direct order to drop the case.”
However, this characterization of Sessions is at odds with how Chris Galanos, the former Mobile district attorney who secured the death penalty conviction for Hays, describes Sessions. And in an interview with THE WEEKLY STANDARD Monday, Galanos further argues that Sessions played a significant role in the Hays prosecution. “I do not believe Jeff Sessions is a racist. That’s based on my professional interactions with him during the 1980s and early 1990s,” Galanos told TWS. “It was because of Jeff’s willingness to help us that Hays and [accomplice James “Tiger”] Knowles were indicted. Down the road a guy named Frank Cox who provided the rope was also indicted, and the leader of the Klan at that time, Henry Hays’s father Bennie Hays was also indicted.”
According to Galanos, securing Henry Hays’s conviction was a long, involved process, and the resources Sessions provided helped break the case wide open. Here’s what Galanos describes happening in his own words, taken from our phone interview:
TWS asked Galanos whether Sessions was personally involved in securing the large amount of federal assistance in the case detailed here. Galanos replied, “Oh yeah, definitely.” Henry Hays’s conviction spawned a chain of events that “ultimately bankrupted the KKK” in Alabama, according to the New York Times. Sessions was later elected state attorney general in Alabama, where he handled Henry Hays’s death penalty appeal, ensuring the death sentence was carried out. Hays was executed six months after Sessions left the state attorney general’s office to become a United States senator.
Galanos notes that he also knew and liked Thomas Figures because “he had been an assistant DA in the state system before he went and became an Assistant U.S. attorney.” Asked why there might be any acrimony between the two men, Galanos said, “I have no idea.” Figures was later indicted by a grand jury for attempting to bribe a drug dealer. He was found innocent, and at the time there were claims that Figures’s indictment was retribution for blowing up Sessions’s judicial nomination. Sessions denied this was the case, telling the New York Times, “I’m sorry people see it that way. It is a matter I would like to see behind me, and I’m sorry to see it come up again.”
But Galanos maintains he does not believe Sessions is the racist that his strident critics say he is. “All I can tell you is that I’ve always considered him to be a good and decent man and in my view based on the scenario that I just related to you, he is no racist,” he says. “He could have told me, ‘It’s your problem, deal with it.’ But he helped.”
Galanos himself is also justly proud of his role in securing the first death penalty conviction for white-on-black crime in Alabama since 1913. “It was a very big deal not only to me personally but it was time that the state of Alabama step up to the plate, and my feeling then and now was that it was our mess and we had a moral obligation to clean it up,” he said. “We just needed a few extra hands on board to do that, and Jeff Sessions gave it to us.”
