LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Charles Booker stands with a noose around his neck in a new campaign ad criticizing his opponent, Republican incumbent Rand Paul, for holding up legislation in 2020 that would have made lynching a federal hate crime in America.
The certain-to-be-controversial ad, which Booker’s campaign released Wednesday morning, includes a content warning for “strong imagery.”
It does not mention that Paul went on to co-sponsor a new (and bipartisan) version of that legislation. The Senate unanimously voted this March to pass the updated Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which is now law.
“The pain of our past persists to this day,” Booker says in a voiceover as his ad begins, showing a historic lynching photo and a noose hanging from the limb of a tree. “In Kentucky, like many states throughout the South, lynching was a tool of terror. It was used to kill hopes for freedom.
“It was used to kill my ancestors,” Booker says as he appears onscreen, standing next to a tree with a noose looped around his neck.
“Now, in a historic victory for our commonwealth, I have become the first Black Kentuckian to receive the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.”
“My opponent?” he says as an image of Paul appears. “The very person who compared expanded health care to slavery. The person who said he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act. The person who singlehandedly blocked an antilynching act from being federal law.”
“The choice couldn’t be clearer,” Booker continues over the resounding creak of a rope, shown in close-up before he appears on-screen with his hands gripping the noose. “Do we move forward together? Or do we let politicians like Rand Paul forever hold us back and drive us apart?
“In November, we will choose healing,” he says as he lifts the noose from around his neck. “We will choose Kentucky.”
Jake Cox, a spokesman for Paul’s campaign, addressed Booker’s ad and the senator’s handling of recent antilynching bills in a statement Wednesday afternoon, saying:
“Dr. Paul worked diligently to strengthen the language of this legislation and is a cosponsor of the bill that now ensures that federal law will define lynching as the absolutely heinous crime that it is. Any attempt to state otherwise is a desperate misrepresentation of the facts.”
Booker’s campaign manager, Bianca Keaton, told The Courier Journal Wednesday the decision to run the controversial imagery in this video was a “difficult choice.”
“It took months to get to the point of actually being like: ‘Is this how we’re going to handle this?’” said Keaton, who added that she gasped when they drove to the location where they filmed the ad and she saw the noose hanging there — something she’d never before seen.
“And the thing that I would share with you generally about the subject of lynching in this country is: It’s ugly. You know, people don’t want to see it.”
Keaton said there are “so many other ways in which terror is invoked on Black communities.” She pointed to last month’s mass shooting in Buffalo, where a white man who has been linked to white supremacist hatred and apparently espoused a racist conspiracy theory is charged with killing 10 people and injuring three more individuals, nearly all of them Black.
“Republicans will talk about race using dog whistles,” she said.
“We’re going to do it on a bullhorn.”
What Rand Paul said about the Civil Rights Act
In his new ad, Booker referenced a handful of controversial comments Paul previously has made.
Booker’s statement that Paul said he would’ve opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is an apparent reference to a controversy dating back to a 2010 interview Paul did with The Courier Journal’s editorial board, during which the future senator was asked if he would have voted for that landmark law outlawing segregation in public places and business establishments and prohibiting employment discrimination.
In that interview, Paul praised the Civil Rights Act’s prohibition against discrimination in public domains but indicated he disliked the idea of telling private business owners what they can and can’t do with their establishments, citing concerns about freedom.
“I abhor racism. I think it’s a bad business decision to ever exclude anybody from your restaurant, but at the same time I do believe in private ownership,” said Paul, who went on to be elected to the Senate for the first time later that year. “But I think there should be absolutely no discrimination in anything that gets any public funding, and that’s most of what the Civil Rights Act was about, to my mind.”
Paul’s comment on the Civil Rights Act was highly controversial, and he later went on to repeatedly stress that he supports this historic law.
Keaton, Booker’s campaign manager, said Wednesday that Paul hasn’t evolved on the topic. “He just realized that folks weren’t with him on that, and he changed his tune to not be in a position where he was so vulnerable …”
She suggested Paul’s support of a later version of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act after holding up the 2020 iteration was motivated by similar concerns.
What Rand Paul said about comparing ‘expanded health care to slavery’
In this week’s new campaign ad, Booker also blasts Paul for comparing “expanded health care to slavery.”
That’s an apparent reference to something Paul, an opthalmologist, said during a 2011 Senate hearing opposing the expansion of health care under President Obama.
“With regard to the idea whether or not you have a right to health care, you have to realize what that implies. I am a physician. You have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery,” he said at the time.
“You are going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants, the nurses.”
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Keaton indicated this is just one example of how Paul’s behavior as a senator shows “the unseriousness” with which he approaches policy, and particularly policy specific to race.
What happened with Rand Paul and recent antilynching legislation
The main bill Booker’s ad focuses on, as well as the updated version of it that Paul supported earlier this year, is named in honor of Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 and whose horrific death catalyzed the civil rights movement.
The primary aim of this legislation was to list lynching — a form of violence white people have used throughout American history to brutalize, murder and terrorize Black people in Kentucky and across the country — as a federal hate crime after Congress had failed for more than a century to pass antilynching bills.
Paul placed a hold on the original Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2020 and later sought unanimous consent from the Senate for an amended version of the bill that he indicated would ensure it didn’t apply to crimes that resulted in relatively minor injuries like bruises and cuts.
Rand Paul:The Emmett Till Antilynching act was worth taking the time to get it right
He received intense criticism for pumping the brakes on that bill two years ago, including from the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
At the time, Paul said lynching is “a tool of terror that claimed the lives of nearly 5,000 Americans between 1881 and 1968” and defended his stance on the bill, saying: “I seek to amend this legislation, not because I take it or I take lynching lightly, but because I take it seriously — and this legislation does not.”
Paul’s amendment was blocked, and the original bill didn’t advance in the Senate either.
Paul introduced his own proposal, the Marie Thompson Antilynching Act, last year. That legislation, named after a Kentucky woman lynched by a mob in 1904, did not advance in Congress either.
This year, he co-sponsored a new version of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act that Sens. Cory Booker, D-N.J., and Tim Scott, R-S.C., introduced.
He told The Courier Journal he negotiated with Cory Booker on a compromise that addressed his concerns, and he supported the legislation that has since become law.
Reaction to Charles Booker’s new ad
Keaton said Wednesday morning the response to the ad so far was “overwhelmingly positive,” although they understand some folks will find it uncomfortable to watch.
University of Louisville political science professor Dewey Clayton said he thought the ad was “outlandish,” although he noted sometimes politicians like to have that shock element to draw in viewers.
“An ad like that will clearly gain attention, but I think it paints Sen. Paul in a slightly unfair sort of position,” Clayton said.
Some people may see this ad as outlandish, but he expects many will see Booker is “really just trying to make a point.”
As for where Booker’s campaign goes from here, Keaton said: “This ad is a piece of a much broader story that we will have to tell.”
Morgan Watkins is The Courier Journal’s chief political reporter. Contact her at mwatkins@courierjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter: @morganwatkins26.
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