More than 1,100 U.S. law school professors wrote to Congress Tuesday to urge Senate rejection of President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions for attorney general.
The letter was signed by professors from 170 law schools in 48 states and will also run as a full-page newspaper ad, The Washington Post reported.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is holding confirmation hearings for Sessions next week.
"We are convinced that Jeff Sessions will not fairly enforce our nation's laws and promote justice and equality in the United States," the letter states.
The professors focused on Sessions's nomination — and rejection — in 1986 of a federal judgeship after his prosecution in 1985 of three civil rights activists for voter fraud in Alabama.
"Nothing in Senator Sessions' public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge," they wrote.
But the senator's former chief counsel William Smith, who is African American, has said people who call Sessions racially insensitive are "just lying. And they should stop the smear campaign," the Post reported.
"The people making these allegations against Senator Sessions don't know him," Smith said in an interview, the Post reported. "In the last 30 years, they probably haven't spent 10 hours with him. I spent 10 years working with him . . . as his top legal adviser. There are not statements that he made that are inappropriate."
The NAACP also is protesting his nomination for attorney general, calling it "despicable and unacceptable" — a view fiercely rejected by Sessions's spokeswoman, Sarah Flores, the Post reported.
"Many African-American leaders who've known him for decades attest to this and have welcomed his nomination to be the next Attorney General," Flores said in a statement, the Post reported.
"These false portrayals of Senator Sessions will fail as tired, recycled, hyperbolic charges that have been thoroughly rebuked and discredited. From the Fraternal Order of Police and the National Sheriffs' Association to civil rights leaders and African-American elected officials, to victims' rights organizations, Senator Sessions has inspired confidence from people across the country that he will return the Department of Justice to an agency the American people can be proud of once again."