Barack Obama

U.S. Senate apologizes for 100 years of lynchings

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

CHICAGO TRIBUNE
By Frank James
Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON -- The Senate apologized Monday to lynching victims and their descendants, a belated attempt to make amends for what some lawmakers acknowledged was the Senate's shameful 19th and 20th Century history of blocking efforts to end the grisly practice of lynching African-Americans.

With the survivor of a lynching and families of victims watching from the Senate's visitors' gallery, Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat and main sponsor of the legislation calling for a rare Senate apology, spoke with an unusual visual aid. It was a gruesome 1930s-era photo of a black lynching victim hanging from a tree as a white mob, including children, looked on, with many of them smiling.

"The Senate was wrong not to act," she said, referring to the chamber's repeated failure over a nearly 100-year period to support the efforts of the House and seven presidents to make lynching a federal crime.

Those efforts were undone over the decades by filibusters by Southern senators, either racists themselves or unwilling to anger racist constituents. Available records indicate mobs, often with the complicity of local officials, lynched at least 4,742 people, three-fourths of them black, between 1882 and 1968.

"That was wrong to not stand in the way of the mob," Landrieu said. "We lacked courage then. We perhaps don't have all the courage we need today to do everything that we should do.

"But I know that we can apologize today," she said. "We can be sincere in our apology to the families, to their loved ones, and perhaps now we can set some of these victims and their families free and most of all set our country free to be better than it is today."

But even as a majority of the Senate--80 lawmakers as of the time of Monday night's vote--signed onto Landrieu's resolution, there was a sense of the unfinished business still before America when it comes to race relations.

That all 100 senators didn't unanimously sign onto the apology seemed to bear out writer William Faulkner's line that "the past is never dead; it's not even past."

As a condition of getting the apology legislation to a point where it could be approved by the Senate, its supporters had to settle for a voice vote instead of the more typical roll-call vote where each vote is individually recorded. There was, however, no audible opposition when the vote was taken.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the Democratic 2004 presidential nominee, said, "I think it's critical that we take the step we're taking and have taken, but at the same time wouldn't it have been just that much more extraordinary and significant if we were having a recorded vote with all 100 senators recording their votes? We're not."

Many of the senators cited the book "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" as a major spur to the action.

Landrieu and others cited the casual brazenness of the spectators and perpetrators as one of the most troubling aspects of the photos because it suggested they had little to fear of being brought to justice. The traveling photographic exhibit on which the book is based is on display at the Chicago Historical Society.

In one of the day's many ironies, it was two Southern senators who spearheaded the apology, Landrieu and Sen. George Allen (R-Va.).

"This august body has a stain on its history," Allen said of the Senate's previous failures to take a stand against lynching. "And that stain is lynching."

Another irony was that the apology was approved on the same day as the start of the Mississippi trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a reputed Ku Klux Klan leader who is charged in the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. Philip Dray, author of another book on lynchings, "At the Hands of Persons Unknown," said it's uncertain what would have happened if the Senate had passed anti-lynching legislation, but its failure had the effect of galvanizing opposition to lynching.

Lynchings and legal inaction led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It also gave a major impetus to the civil rights movement.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the Senate's only African-American, said, "I do hope that as we commemorate this past injustice that this chamber also spends some time however doing something concrete and tangible to heal the long shadow of slavery and the legacy of racial discrimination so that 100 years from now we can look back and be proud and not having to apologize once again."

"There are more ways to perpetrate violence than simply a lynching," he said. "There's the violence that we subject young children to when they don't have any opportunities, when they have no hope . . . . That's the kind of violence this chamber could do something about."

Descendants of victims seemed inclined to accept the Senate's action, as did James Cameron, 91, of Milwaukee, who was lynched in Marion, Ind., in 1930, when he was 16, but survived.

"We believe an apology is the beginning," said Doria Dee Johnson, 44, of Evanston, Ill. Her great-great-grandfather, Anthony Crawford, was a farmer in Abbeville, S.C., and pillar of the black community, who was lynched in 1916 after a dispute with a white farmer. "It takes a lot for people to admit when they're wrong" she said. "For the Senate to do it as a body I think is courageous. We haven't seen this sort of statement from the U.S. Senate."