City of Enterprise issues a proclamation honoring Richard Shelby
U.S. Senator Richard Shelby was in Enterprise last Thursday, where the City awarded him a proclamation honoring him for his 36 years of service to the state in the Senate. “Grateful to the City of Enterprise and Mayor [William] Cooper for the proclamation regarding my career in public service,” Shelby said on Twitter. “I’ve had the pleasure of representing the people of Enterprise in the Senate for the last 36 years. Thank you, Enterprise, for allowing me that high honor.” Shelby is retiring at the end of this year after six terms in the Senate. He is the Ranking Republican on the powerful Senate Appropriations committee, which he chaired until Republicans lost control of the Senate in 2021. Despite his pending retirement, Shelby is still very engaged in national affairs. “Since President [Joe] Biden took office in January 2021, inflation has risen 13.5%,” Shelby said on Twitter. “Democrats are clearly in over their heads and unable to bring down costs. The American people are tired of overpaying for gas, groceries, utility bills, etc. It’s unaffordable and unacceptable.” Shelby defeated incumbent Republican Senator Jeremiah Denton in 1986 to win the office as a Democrat. Shelby never really had a close election after that first election, easily besting five general election opponents in the years since. In 1994 Shelby switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party. Shelby has been credited with landing federal dollars for projects across the state over the years. “There is not a city or county in Alabama that has not benefitted from Senator Shelby’s seniority and power,” political columnist former State Rep. Steve Flowers wrote recently. “Every major university has received additional federal dollars for development and new buildings. He has literally transformed the University of Alabama. An entire section of the massive campus has a cadre of buildings, mostly science, technology, and engineering that are or should be named for him because he brought the money from Washington to pay for them. Shelby had sixteen years of public service prior to his Senate service. From 1970 to 1978, he represented Tuscaloosa in the Alabama Senate. From 1978 to 1986, he represented Alabama’s Seventh Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Shelby has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Alabama and a law degree from the University of Alabama School of Law. Katie Britt is the presumptive heir apparent to Shelby’s seat in the Senate. The Republican nominee served an internship in Shelby’s office, where she eventually worked her way up to chief of staff after obtaining he law degree. Shelby has endorsed Britt, who won the Republican nomination after a hard-fought primary fight against Congressman Mo Brooks and veteran and millionaire defense contractor Mike Durant. Britt still faces voters in the November 8 general election, where she faces Democratic nominee Dr. Will Boyd and Libertarian nominee John Sophocleus. Even though the Senate is divided 50:50 between Republicans and Democrats (including two independents who caucus with the Democrats) the open Senate seat has not become a national battleground. Both of Britt’s opponents have been unable to raise money, either in Alabama or nationally. Virtually all indications are that Shelby’s seat will remain in Republican hands. To connect with the author of this story, or to comment, email brandonmreporter@gmail.com.
Steve Flowers: Who is Mike Durant?
Many of you have asked the question, “Have you ever seen anyone simply run a media-only campaign and avoid campaigning like Mike Durant has done in this year’s U.S. Senate campaign.” Surprisingly my answer for many of you is, “Yes, I have.” Ironically, the man that Richard Shelby beat for this U.S. Senate seat 36 years ago, Jeremiah Denton, was almost a carbon copy of Mike Durant. Denton was a POW/national war hero of the Vietnam era. Like Durant, Denton had very distant ties to and knowledge of Alabama. They were both National War/POW celebrities who wanted to be a United States Senator from whichever state was convenient. Alabama had an open seat for the Senate in 1980. Denton called Mobile home but had not lived there since he was a boy. His father was a Naval officer, and Jeremiah followed suit and went to the Naval Academy and became a navy officer and rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. When the race began, Denton was basically living in the Washington D.C. area. Alabama had not had a Republican senator since Reconstruction over 100 years earlier. The Republicans recruited Denton to break the barrier. Denton really did no personal campaigning in Alabama. He was a short-tempered military man whose personality had been even more exacerbated by seven years and seven months of captivity by barbaric Vietnamese. Denton was swept into office in 1980 in the Ronald Reagan Republican landslide. He never aspired to go into politics. He only wanted to be a good soldier. After his release from captivity, he came back to a hero’s welcome. Denton became Alabama’s first Republican and Catholic Senator and never really campaigned. Denton became Alabama’s least effective and insignificant senator in our state’s history. He only served one six-year term, 1980-1986. During that one term, he never came to Alabama, never returned a phone call, and never responded to any letters. He began his career by announcing he was a United States Senator and not the Junior Senator from Alabama. He said his role was bigger than just taking care of mundane, senatorial duties and “kissing babies’ butts.” Thus, he immediately forewarned Alabamians that for the next six years, we would only have one U.S. Senator – the country would be blessed with our other senate seat. Mike Durant is amazingly similar, almost a clone to Jeremiah Benton. Unlike Denton, who was born in Mobile, Durant was born and spent his entire formulative years in New Hampshire. Like Denton, Durant’s father was a military man. Mike Durant followed his father. As is well known, Durant was shot down and captured, and made a prisoner of war for 11 days. Durant’s life is really a mystery after that point. He calls Huntsville his home, and he has had a military defense company in Huntsville, which made him very wealthy through federal defense dollars. Durant’s being an Alabamian or Huntsvillian has come into question. Nobody seems to know him in Huntsville, much less the rest of the state. Speculation is that he lives in Maryland, and he also has a very expensive home in Colorado. If he were to be elected to Alabama’s Senate seat, he would probably go home to Maryland. Durant would not only be a phantom Senate candidate, but he would also be our phantom senator. Durant has only voted in a Republican primary in Alabama one time in his life, and that was in 2008. That means one of three things about him: (1) he is not a Republican, (2) he is not an Alabamian, or (3) he is not a Republican or an Alabamian. The only thing we do know about Durant is that he was born and raised in New Hampshire. Where I come from in Alabama, that would make him what we call a carpetbagger. A carpetbagger who refuses to meet or ask any Alabamians for their vote. The only thing we know about him is that he can fly around in a helicopter, and he can afford to buy a lot of television ads. Guess he thinks we are dumb enough to fall for that pig in a poke, or he might find that after a while, we will wake up and realize that Emperor has no clothes. Durant makes no pretense about the fact that he will not personally campaign in Alabama or even do interviews. You can bet your bottom dollar that wherever you live in Alabama, Durant has not been to your town or city and probably could not even tell you where it is located. You can rest assured that he does not know the difference between the Wiregrass and Sand Mountain. See you next week. Steve Flowers is Alabama’s leading political columnist. His column appears in over 60 Alabama newspapers. He served 16 years in the state legislature. Steve may be reached at www.steveflowers.us.
Former AP civil rights reporter Kathryn Johnson dies
Kathryn Johnson, a trailblazing reporter for The Associated Press whose intrepid coverage of the civil rights movement and other major stories led to a string of legendary scoops, died Wednesday. She was 93. Her niece, Rebecca Winters, said Johnson died Wednesday morning in Atlanta. Johnson was the only journalist allowed inside Martin Luther King Jr.’s home the day he was assassinated. When Gov. George Wallace blocked black students from entering the University of Alabama, she sneaked in to cover his confrontation with federal officials. She scored exclusive interviews with 2nd Lt. William L. Calley Jr. before he was convicted of his role in the My Lai massacre. “I was never ambitious, really, anxious to make money …,” she told an interviewer for an AP oral history project in 2007. Johnson said she didn’t want to be bored and added, “in most of my career, I really wasn’t.” That career spanned a half-century, from the era of reporters racing each other to pay phones to the birth of 24-hour cable television news. She began covering King when he was a little-known Baptist preacher from Atlanta. She had also written about his wife, Coretta, who was a talented singer. The evening of April 4, 1968, Johnson and a date were on their way to the movies when news of the assassination came over the radio. When she arrived at the King house, two reporters were chatting with a police officer on the porch. The front door opened, and Johnson could see Coretta Scott King in a pink nightgown, standing in the hall. “She spotted me and said, ‘Let Kathryn in,’” she recalled. Johnson was at the home every day, giving the AP several scoops — including an 11-hour beat over archrival United Press International on the funeral arrangements. She later wrote the book “My Time With the Kings,” which was published in 2016 and recollected her time covering the civil rights movement. “Kathryn Johnson was essential reading on one of the most important stories of the 20th century, and she did it by being at the center of the action, close to the most important newsmakers,” AP Executive Editor Sally Buzbee said. Born in Columbus, Georgia, Johnson graduated from Agnes Scott College, a private, all-woman school in Decatur, Georgia, in 1947. In December of that year, she dropped by the local AP office looking for a job; she was offered a secretarial position. “I think she was an unknown pioneer in that field,” Winters said. Twelve years later, after the American Newspaper Guild interceded, Johnson was finally given a writing job. She said she got the civil rights beat because the men “did not want to cover a black movement.” “When my aunt was interested in this young preacher named Martin Luther King, the men in journalism didn’t want anything to do with a black man and interviewing him,” Winters said. “She was just enthralled with the man, before he was famous.” Her first big story was Charlayne Hunter’s integration of the University of Georgia in January 1961. Still youthful looking at 34, she impersonated a student to get close to Hunter. In June 1963, Johnson was in Tuscaloosa, where Wallace blocked the entrance of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium to black students. She and the other reporters were ushered into a large room and locked in. She went to the door and told the young patrolman that she had to use the “ladies room.” She went to the front doorway where Wallace and Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach were talking, and slipped under a large table set up for microphones. She was just a couple of feet from Wallace’s legs. For Christmas in 1969, Johnson was asked to interview the wives of Navy men missing in action or held captive in North Vietnam. Among them was Navy Capt. Jeremiah Denton, among the first prisoners of war to return home in 1973. “When my father came home, she became very close to our family and covered my father,” Denton’s daughter, Mary Denton Lewis, recalled. “He trusted Kathryn more than any other reporter because of her close relationship with my mom.” Denton retired with the rank of Rear Admiral and later served in the U.S. Senate.From late 1970 to early 1971, she covered the hearings and courts-martial stemming from the March 1968 massacre of Vietnamese civilians at the village of My Lai, and developed a rapport with Calley, the officer charged with the slaughter. Before the verdict, she persuaded Calley to give her two interviews: One for an acquittal, another for a conviction. She left the AP in 1979 to take an associate editor’s position at U.S. News & World Report. In 1988, she joined CNN, working there full time until 1999. Associated Press writers Bernard McGhee and Jeff Martin in Atlanta contributed to this report. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
With friends like these: Richard Shelby ran 1986 ad suggesting Jeff Sessions called KKK ‘good ole boys’
Thirty years ago, a campaign ad suggested Jeff Sessions saw the Ku Klux Klan as a bunch of “good ole boys.” But, as John Sharp of AL.com notes, the attacks against the then-U.S. Attorney seeking a spot on the federal bench, wasn’t from Democrats like Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy who was fighting his nomination. The 1986 ad came from Congressman Richard Shelby – who would later become one of Sessions’ colleagues and a longtime friend in the Senate. William Stewart, professor emeritus of political sciences at the University of Alabama, says the relationship between Shelby and Sessions “definitely changed.” Shelby, who narrowly won that 1986 election for his first term in the U.S. Senate, will likely support Sessions as he faces the Senate Judiciary Committee for a confirmation hearing on his nomination as Donald Trump‘s Attorney General – the same committee that denied Sessions’ appointment as a federal judge 30 years ago. In a statement, Shelby called Sessions “a dear friend” of more than 20 years and “a man of great integrity.” “I was an enthusiastic supporter of Jeff in his bid to join me in the U.S. Senate,” Shelby said. “We have been rock-solid partners in Congress ever since.” Much has changed over the past three decades. Sharp writes: “The linkage of Sessions to the Klan by Shelby occurred days before the Nov. 3, 1986, election. Shelby, then a Democrat, won his first Senate term that year by defeating Republican Sen. Jeremiah Denton by a razor-thin margin of 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent. “Denton, at the time, had backed Sessions’ nomination to the federal judiciary. The Judiciary Committee hearings proved to be a disaster at the time that battered Sessions’ reputation after his nomination was rejected amid allegations that he once called a black staffer “a boy,” that he considered the NAACP as ‘un-American’ and used criminal prosecutions to thwart voting rights for blacks. “In addition, a colleague testified that Sessions once joked that he felt the Ku Klux Klan was okay until he learned they smoked marijuana.” A Tuscaloosa Democrat at the time, Shelby used the comments to blast Denton in a campaign ad, angering Sessions, who told the Mobile Register the claims were “slanderous” and “absolutely false.” “I expect the false ad to be withdrawn at once,” Sessions said in a Nov. 3, 1986, article. He demanded an apology from Shelby. Shelby – a Republican since 1994 – now takes a decidedly different view of his one-time opponent: “Jeff Sessions’ record of standing up for all Americans and his high moral character indisputably prove that the 30-year-old claims of the past are nothing more than baseless political accusations.”
