Black Senate candidate wears noose in attack ad against Rand Paul

Democratic Kentucky Senate candidate Charles Booker wore a noose in a campaign ad attacking his opponent, Republican Sen. Rand Paul.

Booker, who served one term in the Kentucky state House and failed to win the 2020 Democratic Senate primary, is now the first black Kentuckian to receive the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.

While wearing a noose, Booker said that "lynching was a tool of terror" that was used to "kill hopes for freedom" as well as his ancestors.

"My opponent?" Booker stated as Rand Paul's face appeared in the video. "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."

As the rope creaks, Booker continued: "The choice couldn't be clearer. Do we move forward together? Or do we let politicians like Rand Paul forever hold us back and drive us apart?"

Paul campaign spokesman Jake Cox criticized Booker's ad in a statement to USA Today on Wednesday.

"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," he said. "Any attempt to state otherwise is a desperate misrepresentation of the facts."

Paul has repeatedly stressed that he supports the Civil Rights Act, after  he came underfire for a 2010 Courier Journal interview.

"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," Paul said at the time. "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."

As to the comments on slavery, during a 2011 Senate hearing on health care, Paul said, "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 added, "You are going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants, the nurses."

Paul did block the original Emmett Till Antilynching Act in 2020, but he went on to co-sponsor a bipartisan version of that bill, which passed the Senate in March.