“During high school, Alvin was an active member of Gilfield Baptist Church and the NAACP,” the obituary reads. “Among many other community activities, Alvin led student sit-ins as part of the movement to desegregate a Petersburg restaurant.”
On Monday, his son was accused by white Southern lawmakers of engaging in a prosecution that resembled Alabama’s racist justice system in the 1950s.
Rep. Dan Bishop (R-North Carolina) is running for attorney general in his home state this November, and as a Republican running in a Republican-leaning state, he has perhaps predictably embraced his rhetoric, including harsh criticism of former President Donald Trump’s recent legal troubles, including his conviction on felony charges filed against Bragg last week.
Bishop spoke about his beliefs during a conversation with local radio host Pete Culliner, as first reported by Axios’ Stephen Newcomb.
In response to Culliner’s question, Bishop said President Biden shouldn’t be indicted on bribery charges in North Carolina (the ostensible premise here was that Biden forgave student loan debt to garner votes), but he thought criminal charges were warranted.
“Those who engaged in the abuse of prosecutorial power,” namely those involved in the prosecution of Donald Trump, “should themselves be prosecuted,” Bishop said.
He then gave a brilliant assessment of what its exploits in Manhattan were like.
“When I say that those who engage in selective prosecution, those who take advantage of it and perpetrate it, are injustice, I don’t just believe that they’re not in a fair fight. They go to places where they know the fight is unfair,” he said. “They did that in Alabama in 1950, if you were black, to get justice. And they did just that in New York.”
The “they” in this case was Alvin Bragg, who grew up in Harlem. Bishop singled out Bragg, saying he and special prosecutor Jack Smith “should be charged with misusing their power, with no excuse for not knowing it, and with interfering with our election.”
Bishop’s point about the prosecutors being in an “unfair” location seems to suggest that the trial was held in Manhattan to maximize Trump’s chances of being convicted. In reality, of course, the crimes occurred at the Trump Organization, which is also in Manhattan.
But the comments pale in comparison to Bishop’s comparison of Trump’s prosecution to Jim Crow Alabama, where in 1950 there was an explicit system of race-based oppression aimed at protecting white power. This was five years before Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the wrong seat on a Montgomery bus, and 13 years before Martin Luther King Jr. was jailed in Birmingham for leading an anti-segregation demonstration.
At that time, and for decades, black people in Alabama were targeted by state and local authorities simply because they were black. Even if Trump hadn’t committed the crimes he was accused of (a jury found he had), in Bishop’s view, the targeting would have been because of Trump’s politics. It wouldn’t have been racist or systemic; it would have been personal. In Jim Crow Alabama, by contrast, power was used against and to send a message to a broad range of residents.
Bishop should know better. He was born in Charlotte in 1964, in a Southern state near the end of the Jim Crow era. The sit-ins, for example, were an anti-racism tactic that began in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1960.
But then again, Bishop is a Trump ally running as a Republican in a Republican state, which means demonstrating her loyalty to Trump and blasting the former president’s prosecution in the strongest terms possible, which for Bishop meant drawing comparisons to the systematic oppression of black people in the South.
Alvin Bragg’s father would probably dispute the comparison.
