NAACP Members Arrested for Protesting Pro-KKK Attorney General Pick

Leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People or NAACP in Alabama were arrested after staging a sit-in Tuesday to protest the nomination of renowned racist U.S. Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as the nation's next attorney general, vowing to occupy his Mobile, Alabama, office until he withdrew as a candidate.

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Sessions has a record of controversial positions on race, immigration and criminal justice reform. Along with the sit-in, the NAACP organized demonstrations at his offices statewide to draw attention to concerns about his track record.

"Senator Sessions has callously ignored the reality of voter suppression but zealously prosecuted innocent civil rights leaders on trumped-up charges of voter fraud," NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks said in a news release. "As an opponent of the vote, he can't be trusted to be the chief law enforcement officer for voting rights."

Brooks posted a photo on Twitter of protesters in suits occupying the senator's Mobile office. About a dozen participated before leading members – including NAACP President Cornell William Brooks and Alabama State Conference of the NAACP president Benard Simelton – were zip-tied and arrested by police. Sessions was not in Mobile at the time.

President-elect Donald Trump in November named Sessions to lead the Justice Department and the FBI, and his history could be scrutinized during a confirmation process before his fellow senators.

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Sessions was a federal prosecutor in 1986 when he became only the second nominee in 50 years to be denied confirmation as a federal judge. This came after allegations that he had made racist remarks, including testimony that he had called an African-American prosecutor "boy," an allegation Sessions denied.

Sessions said at his hearing that groups such as the NAACP and the American Civil Liberties Union could be considered "un-American." A former colleague said Sessions mentioned he was “okay” with the Ku Klux Klan, but no longer when he learned some members smoked marijuana, reported the New York Daily News. Sessions later said he “meant no harm by it.”

He also acknowledged that he had called the Voting Rights Act of 1965 a "piece of intrusive legislation," levelled voter fraud charges against three people involved in registering Black people to vote, and called voting by undocumented immigrants a “radical and illegal action” that should immediately be shot down.