Barack Obama

U.S. Senate apologizes for not enacting anti-lynching legislation

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

CHICAGO DAILY SOUTHTOWN
By Marcus K. Garner

Doria Dee Johnson, of Evanston, had waited a long time to see this day.
In 1916, her great-great-grandfather Anthony Crawford was lynched by a crowd of nearly 400 - hung and shot 200 times - for arguing with a white man over cotton prices. After his death, the family's land was taken.

So Johnson was particularly attentive Monday evening as the U.S. Senate extended an apology to the hundreds of families, like hers, who were victims of lynchings dating back to the end of slavery.

"It was surreal," said Johnson, who has been pushing Congress for the apology. "I was happy for the families represented there, and for the families of the nameless."

The Senate passed a resolution apologizing for failing to enact anti-lynching laws that might have prevented the brutal deaths of nearly 5,000 black Americans.

Coming to terms with this painful part of the nation's history is the only way the United States can "effectively champion human rights abroad," the resolution said.

"Lynching was a form of terrorism practiced by Americans against other Americans," said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), who co-sponsored the resolution.

Landrieu said they were often public spectacles, some attended by civic leaders, and happened in all mainland U.S. states except four in New England.

More than 100 of Crawford's family members gathered Monday with descendants of three other lynching victims in the senate gallery in Washington, D.C., as senators expressed regrets for their predecessors' failings.

"There is no rationale," primary co-sponsor Sen. George Allen (R-Va.) said. "This is a somber time. A time when we're trying to make sure all Americans have equal opportunities."

But Allen, one of 22 Republicans co-sponsoring the resolution, said the opportunities the Constitution promised were withheld.

"The Senate turned its back on its foundation and its principals of justice," he said.

Between 1882 and 1968, there were 4,742 reports of people - predominantly blacks - being lynched in the United States in brutal displays of racial hatred. More went undocumented.

In that time, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced to the Senate to no avail.

Landrieu and Allen said they were motivated in part by a recent book, "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," in which author James Allen collected lynching pictures, mostly taken by those participating in the killings.

"More than a half-century ago, mere feet from where we sit ... the Senate failed you and your ancestors and our nation," Landrieu told descendants at a lunch in the Capitol.

The Senate didn't enact anti-lynching legislation despite repeated urging from civil rights groups, seven presidents and the House of Representatives. Southern Democrats blocked voting with filibusters, at one point stretching the stall tactic for six weeks.

"People like Ida B. Wells spent an entire career trying to legislate against these lynching practices," said Sen. Barack Obama (D-Chicago), another co-sponsor.

Senators Monday said protection against lynching was the minimum and most basic of federal responsibilities owed to American citizens. Obama said it was important for the Senate to further that goal.

"It is important even as we remember that history, that we use that history to make sure we're making the right decisions about what we do going forward," he said.

Lynching dates back to the nation's beginnings, once used as a means of policing in places where there was no law. But the practice didn't have racial implications at first, being used during the Revolutionary War to punish Tories, colonists loyal to the English government.

Lynching occurred when courts weren't accessible, particularly in frontier territories as the nation's boundaries were being stretched westward to the Pacific coast.

"It was a way of punishing horse thieves," said Joy Bivins, a historian at the Chicago Historical Society, and curator of the "Without Sanctuary" exhibit, now showing at CHS.

When slavery was abolished in 1865, lynching took on a whole new connotation, Bivins said, and mostly black men were condemned to death without the rights of due process.

"Most scholars will say it was a way of maintaining social control in the absence of slavery," she said. "It was a way of prohibiting African Americans from enjoying full rights."

Lynching took place in all but four continental states, and the vast majority of the slayings were committed in southern states.

Mississippi, Texas, Georgia and Louisiana led the southern states with the most people killed in lynchings. And lynchings became social events, with children in some towns getting out of school, and workers taking off to witness men being tortured, burned alive, hanged or shot to death.

The practice reached its murderous height in the 1890s, with roughly 125 cases reported each year, Bivins said.

The first federal anti-lynching bill to take hold in Congress was introduced in 1921 by Republican Rep. Leonidias Dyer of Missouri.

Now that history has been acknowledged, Obama challenged other senators to make the future better for African Americans by improving education and job opportunities.

"I think that even some that support (the resolution) may not be making the efforts that are needed right now to eliminate some of the ongoing legacy of discrimination," Obama said. "The Senate's job today is to make sure that we are leaving a better country for our children."

Simeon Wright was in the Senate hall Monday night. He saw his cousin Emmett Till dragged from his home in Money, Miss., 50 years ago, never to return. Two white men lynched the 14-year-old Till for whistling at a white woman.

Wright, 62, said the congressional apology was long overdue, for his family and for others.

"If federal legislation had been in place in 1955, there's no way men would have come into my house and taken Emmett out and killed him," Wright said. "But since it wasn't a federal crime, they knew the state of Mississippi wasn't going to do anything about it."

But Wright said the apology is better late than never.

"It's better than anything that's been done in the past 50 years ... in the past 200 years," he said. "It's a step forward."