WASHINGTON Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and his supporters sought on Tuesday to convince the American public that he wont discriminate against people of color if he is confirmed as the attorney general, the nations top law enforcement officer.

The last time Sessions went before the Senate for confirmation to a federal judgeship in 1986 senators blocked him over concerns of racial bias. As a U.S. attorney in 1985, he had prosecuted three African-American activists for alleged voter fraud over disputed absentee ballots. The activists were subsequently acquitted .

Sessions defended his record as a U.S. attorney during Tuesdays hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. I did not harbor the kind of animosities and race-based discrimination ideas that were that I was accused of. I did not, he said.

But Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the top Democrat on the committee, said there is a deep fear about what a Trump administration will bring in many places. She added, This is the context in which we must consider Sen. Sessions record.

One of Sessions primary critics at his Senate hearing three decades ago was Thomas Figures, a black assistant U.S. attorney who had previously worked for him. Figures, who died in 2015, told the committee that Sessions had called him boy more than once a slur meant to demean and disrespect when used to address black men.

Sessions also joked about the Ku Klux Klan, according to Figures: He recalled Sessions describing the KKK as OK until he learned that they smoked marijuana. And Figures said Sessions had called the NAACP, the storied African-American civil rights group, anti-American.

Sessions said on Tuesday that this caricature of him is not correct. He rebuked the KKK, saying he abhorred their hateful ideology. He also said he fully supported the civil rights lawyers who brought historic cases during his tenure as a U.S. attorney in the 1980s and as the state attorney general of Alabama from 1995 to 1997.