Update, 8:10 p.m.: The NAACP activists occupying Sessions’ office have been arrested after an eight-hour sit-in.
Original post: The NAACP staged a sit-in on Tuesday to protest Donald Trump’s nomination of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions as the next attorney general. Nearly two dozen members of the organization, including its president, Cornell William Brooks, began the protest around 11 a.m. in Sessions’ constituent office in Mobile, Alabama, and vowed to continue until Sessions withdraws his name from consideration for America’s top legal post or they are arrested.
At issue is Sessions’ dismissal of accusations of voter suppressions against minority communities, as well as a history of racist rhetoric and bigoted deeds that make him a threat to the concept of civil rights in the United States. Sessions’ past remarks—once allegedly calling a black lawyer “boy” and warning him to “be careful how you talk to white folks,” as well as joking that his only problem with the Ku Klux Klan was its drug use—were enough to prevent him from a federal judgeship in the 1980s. Sessions has also referred to the NAACP as “un-American” in the past and has called the Voting Rights Act a “piece of intrusive legislation.”
