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Widely admired
Back in Washington, his opponents have depicted Judge Charles W. Pickering as the personification of white Mississippi's oppressive past, a man so hostile to civil rights and black progress that he is unfit for promotion to a federal appeals court," the New York Times noted yesterday in a news story.
"But here [in Laurel, Miss.] on the streets of his small and largely black hometown, far from the bitterness of partisan agendas and position papers, Charles Pickering is a widely admired figure of a very different present," reporter David Firestone wrote.
"In funeral parlors and pharmacies, used-car lots and the City Council chambers, the city's black establishment overwhelmingly supports his nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is heading toward a contentious vote in the Senate in the first major judicial battle of the Bush administration.
"Though few black residents here subscribe to Judge Pickering's staunchly Republican politics, many say they admire his efforts at racial reconciliation, which they describe as highly unusual for a white Republican in the state."
Left-wing groups such as People for the American Way and the NAACP have depicted Judge Pickering as hostile to civil rights. "But such comments carry little weight among those who actually know the man personally here in Laurel, in southeast Mississippi. Judge Pickering, now a federal district judge in the nearby city of Hattiesburg, was praised by black city officials for helping to set up after-school youth programs here, and for directing federal money to medical clinics in low-income areas when he was a state senator. Black business leaders say he was influential in persuading white-owned banks to lend money to black entrepreneurs, helping to strengthen the city's black middle class."
An ugly affair
Senators inclined to vote against the nomination of Judge Charles W. Pickering to a federal appeals court "have a reasonable basis to do so," The Washington Post said yesterday in an editorial.
"But opposing a nominee should not mean destroying him. And the attack on Judge Pickering has become an ugly affair. His critics have focused for the most part not on his qualifications, temperament, approach to judging or on the quality of his judicial work. The judge's opponents, rather, have tried to paint him as a barely reconstructed segregationist. To do so they have plucked a number of unconnected incidents from a long career: a law review article from 1959 on the state's anti-miscegenation statute, written when Judge Pickering was a law student; his incidental contacts as a state legislator in the 1970s with the Mississippi state Sovereignty Commission; and his handling of a cross-burning case in his court a few years back, to cite a few examples. None of these incidents, when examined closely, amounts to much, but opponents string them together, gloss over their complexities and self-righteously present a caricature of an unworthy candidate," the newspaper said.
"The portrayal is particularly unfair because Judge Pickering's history on race is actually quite complicated. His unattractive moments as a politician - voting for unconstitutional voting schemes, for example - hardly distinguish him from other white politicians from his region and of his age. What does distinguish Judge Pickering is that he testified publicly against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1960s and that, as a young prosecutor, he aided the FBI's efforts against the Klan. He has worked since in racial reconciliation efforts. We don't pretend to know his innermost attitudes, but Judge Pickering's entire record is not that of a committed - if now closeted - segregationist; nor did the Senate find him to be such when it unanimously voted to confirm him as a district judge in 1990. The need on the part of liberal groups and Democratic senators to portray him as a Neanderthal - all the while denying they are doing so - in order to justify voting him down is the latest example of the degradation of the confirmation process."
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