GOLDSBORO,
N.C. — Among President Trump’s worrisome nominees to the judiciary,
perhaps none is as alarming as Thomas Alvin Farr, a protégé of Jesse
Helms, the former North Carolina senator, and a product of the modern white supremacist machine that Mr. Helms pioneered.
Mr. Farr, nominated to serve on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina,
began his career as counsel for Mr. Helms’s Senate campaigns, where he
participated in racist tactics to intimidate African-American voters.
This alone is reason to reject his nomination, as is his apparent lying on the topic
to the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Mr. Farr’s connections to Mr.
Helms’s white supremacist causes and political network go much deeper.
Having lived in North Carolina
since childhood, I know Mr. Helms’s racist legacy and I hold no doubts
that Mr. Farr perpetuates it. An unabashed segregationist, Mr. Helms was
affiliated with the Council of Conservative Citizens, an outgrowth of
the White Citizens’ Councils that promoted white supremacy. Mr. Helms,
who served in the Senate for 30 years, used his honorable seat to
support the apartheid regime in South Africa while opposing
desegregation, civil rights legislation and the creation of the Martin
Luther King’s Birthday holiday in this country. Mr. Helms also belittled
Carol Moseley Braun, the only black senator at the time, by singing
“Dixie” to her in the Senate elevator.
Mr.
Farr’s former law partner, Thomas Ellis, was Mr. Helms’s top deputy for
decades. He also served as a director of the Nazi-inspired,
pro-eugenics Pioneer Fund and used funding from that organization to
create and bankroll a network
of interlocking organizations to support Mr. Helms and other political
candidates who espoused the notion of a superior white race and opposed
civil rights.
Together,
Mr. Helms, Mr. Ellis, and their protégé Mr. Farr unleashed a huge
propaganda machine that incited hostility toward African-Americans. Mr.
Farr served as a lead counsel to Mr. Helms’s 1990 Senate campaign, which
ran the now-infamous “White Hands” TV television ad, designed to
inflame white voter anxiety over Mr. Helms’s black opponent, Harvey
Gantt. It showed a pair of white hands balling up a rejection letter
while a voice said: “You needed that job and you were the best
qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial
quota.” The same campaign also sent more than 100,000 intimidating
postcards to North Carolinians, most of whom were blacks
eligible to vote, wrongly suggesting they were ineligible and warning
that they could be prosecuted for fraud if they tried to cast ballots.
Mr.
Farr represented the Helms campaign in 1984, when it circulated photos
of his opponent, Gov. Jim Hunt, with African-American leaders in an
attempt to foster white resentment. The racist nature of that campaign
was so pronounced that a federal court cited it as an example of how
bigotry in elections continued to flourish in North Carolina politics.
A
straight line runs from the racial polarization inflamed for decades by
Mr. Helms and his political machine to the re-emergence of violent
white supremacists in the past year in places like Charlottesville, Va.
When
Mr. Farr graduated from law school, Mr. Helms and Mr. Ellis brought him
into their fold. Mr. Farr joined the small law firm of Maupin, Taylor
& Ellis, where all of the named partners were openly hostile to
civil rights. Mr. Farr followed those lawyers to other firms and
maintained a close collaboration with Mr. Ellis for at least 34 years.
Mr. Farr disclosed on his Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire that
he spoke “in honor of” Mr. Ellis as recently as 2007. And over decades
of association with Mr. Helms and Mr. Ellis, he never publicly denounced
or even faintly criticized their notorious racism and belief in white
superiority.
To
the contrary, Mr. Farr worked closely with Mr. Ellis to represent Mr.
Helms’s agenda in court. Significantly, he represented several of the
Helms entities that received large donations from the Pioneer Fund,
including the Coalition for Freedom.
Most recently, Mr. Farr has carried on Mr. Helms’s legacy by helping North Carolina’s
Republican-led Legislature create and defend in court discriminatory
voting restrictions and electoral districts, which were eventually
struck down by numerous federal courts that found them to be motivated
by intentional racism. In fact, the United States Court of Appeals for
the Fourth Circuit found that the state’s 2013 voter suppression law was
aimed at blacks with “almost surgical precision.”
African-Americans
seeking to have their rights protected under federal law have much to
fear if Mr. Farr takes the bench. This is particularly the case in the
Eastern District of North Carolina,
which covers an area where about half of the state’s African-American
residents live and is often referred to as its Black Belt. The Eastern
District has not had a black judge in its 145-year history. President
Barack Obama’s attempts to desegregate this federal bench were
obstructed by Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina,
who blocked the vote on two highly qualified female African-American
nominees and who now supports Mr. Farr’s nomination to the Eastern
District.
Senators
from both sides of the aisle must condemn the experience Mr. Farr
brings with him. Having practiced white supremacy for decades, Mr. Farr
is not likely to withdraw. Every senator who condemned the racism on
display in Charlottesville must vote to prevent it from having power in
the federal judiciary.
William Barber II is a co-chairman of the Poor People’s Campaign and the author of “The Third Reconstruction.”