Barack Obama

Senate apologizes for past failures to pass anti-lynching legislation

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

By REBECCA CARROLL
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - One woman remembered a cousin who had died at the hands of a mob in Kentucky. Another recalled a teenager dragged from a relative's home in Mississippi only to turn up dead in a river.

James Cameron, founder of America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, lived to recount his own brush with mob justice. In 1930 he and two others were taken from an Indiana jail to face a lynch mob. The mob hanged the two young men accused of murder and rape but spared Cameron when someone in the crowd contended that the 16-year-old was not involved.

"I was saved by a miracle," said Cameron, now 91. People were "hollering for my blood," he recalled, "when a voice said, 'Take this boy back.'"

To the victims of lynching - 4,743 people killed between 1882 and 1968, three out of four of them black - the Senate issued an apology Monday night for not standing against the violence.

"The apology, while late, is very necessary," Doria Dee Johnson, an expert on the subject of lynching and the great-great-granddaughter of a victim. "People suffered. When the United States government could have done something about it, it did not."

Johnson traveled from Evanston, Ill., to witness, along with more than 100 other relatives of Anthony P. Crawford, the voice-vote passage of the Senate resolution. Crawford was lynched in 1916 in Abbeville, S.C.

One of the resolution's chief sponsors, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., noted that the public nature of many of the lynchings was particularly disturbing.

"This was a community spectacle and the Senate of the United States knew it," Landrieu said. "There may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility."

Seven presidents petitioned Congress to end lynchings. Nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in the first half of the 20th century. The House passed three anti-lynching measures between 1920 and 1940, but the Senate passed none.

Senators filibustered anti-lynching measures for a total of six weeks, said the main Republican sponsor of the resolution, Sen. George Allen of Virginia. "It's not easy for people to apologize, but I think it does show the character of the Senate today," he said.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., the Senate's only black member, said, "I do hope that this chamber also spends some time ... doing something concrete and tangible to heal the long shadow of slavery and the legacy of discrimination so that 100 years from now we can look back and be proud and not have to apologize once again."

Simeon Wright said, "Good men did nothing" as his cousin, Emmett Till, was dragged from his uncle's Mississippi home and murdered, reportedly for whistling at a white woman. Wright, who was there the night Till was abducted in 1955, said that if there had been a federal anti-lynching law, "there was no way men would have come into my house and taken him out and killed him."

Lynching is variously defined as a violent act, usually racial in nature, that denies a person due process of law and is carried out with the complicity of the local society. There were reported lynchings in all but four states, with Mississippi at the top with 581 documented incidents between 1882 and 1968, according to researchers at Tuskegee University.

Asked why the resolution was not put to a straight yes-or-no vote and why the debate on the Senate floor had to take place at night, Landrieu said she had accepted the conditions she was offered by the Senate leadership. She noted Congress' busy schedule.

By early evening, at least 75 senators had signed onto the resolution.