Dan Bishop’s offensive, ignorant comparison of Trump’s trial to 1950s Alabama | Opinion
A man named Hunter Biden is being prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice, part of an administration headed by a Democratic president named Joe Biden.
The younger Biden is sitting in the defendant’s chair in a Delaware courtroom this week. He faces up to 25 years for a crime former prosecutor and South Carolina congressman Trey Gowdy suggested Biden perhaps shouldn’t be facing because drug addicts are hardly ever charged in such cases.
Elected Republicans are part of the reason Biden is facing trial at all. Many of them complained about a plea agreement he had secured, explicitly taking politics into a criminal proceeding.
Biden’s trial is happening as a powerful former Democratic senator, Robert Menendez, is also being prosecuted for corruption by the DOJ (Menendez recently changed his party affiliation to independent for a possible re-election run). The decision by the Democrat-led DOJ to (rightly) prosecute a Democrat for alleged corruption could make a usually reliable Democratic race competitive — the opposite of partisan politics.
Republicans who claim Trump was singled out by a politically-minded DOJ have largely been silent this week about the Menendez and Biden trials. It’s likely because those cases show a DOJ conducting prosecutions across the political spectrum, undercutting claims the former president was targeted by a politicized DOJ.
And to be clear. Trump was prosecuted and found guilty of 34 felonies in a N.Y. state court, not by the DOJ.
Into this head-spinning reality stepped North Carolina Congressman Dan Bishop. The man who wants to be North Carolina’s next attorney general said of the Trump prosecution: “It’s as bad as it was in Alabama in 1950 if a person happened to be Black in order to get justice.”
Bishop’s ignorance is astounding. It is deep, wide, impenetrable. He compares what a powerful, wealthy white man in 2024 faces to what Black men faced in the Deep South in the ‘50s. It would be a waste of time to say such a comparison is offensive or call on Bishop to apologize, or at least rethink. It’s obvious Bishop didn’t do much thinking and seems incapable of accomplishing such a feat.
The 1950s was during Jim Crow. It was before Brown v. Board of Education, before the Voting Rights Act, before the Civil Rights Act. It was the decade of the Montgomery boycott in Alabama.
In 1950’s Alabama, and elsewhere in the Deep South, Black men could be snatched off the street and lynched, even stolen from jails by mobs before due process could occur. There were at least 123 lynching victims in North Carolina, including 31 in the Charlotte area, according to the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama. The Initiative documented at least 185 lynchings in South Carolina during that period.
That decade was when Black teen Emmett Till was kidnapped, murdered and his body dumped in a river. An all-white jury quickly found the white men who killed Till not guilty. Those men later bragged about the murder. A photo of Till’s disfigured face on the cover of a national magazine galvanized the Civil Rights Movement.
In the decade before, a 24-year-old Black man named Willie Earle was lynched in Greenville, S.C. by a mob of white men, many of whom openly bragged during the trial about dragging Earle from jail and beating and stabbing him to death on a country road. They were acquitted anyway.
A 21st century congressman who has to be reminded of such things should be embarrassed, especially one who wants to be attorney general in a state trying to leave that dark history behind.
A better comparison to Trump is North Carolina’s John Edwards. He was a top presidential candidate who also tried to hide an illicit affair. He, too, was prosecuted. The jury acquitted Edwards on one count and deadlocked on others.
No one pretended Edwards was on trial only because of politics, or because he was a rich powerful white man, the kind of man long protected by the American justice system like no other. Every elected official in the South should know this basic truth.
That Bishop doesn’t know, or care is disturbing, but not as disturbing as his potentially becoming attorney general of a state trying to leave that dark past behind.
Issac Bailey is a McClatchy Opinion writer in North and South Carolina.
