The Study of Racialism

triguy · Superuser Joined: 27 Apr 2005 {Posts: 878 }

(12 Republican Senators, mostly from the South refused to co-sponsor this.)

Senate apologizes for not enacting anti-lynching law
By Ana Radelat, Gannett News Service
WASHINGTON — Anthony Crawford, a black landowner, was beaten by a mob, tied to a truck and dragged through town. His attackers then hung him from a tree in the Abbeville, S.C., fairgrounds and shot him about 200 times.
Senator Mary Landrieu, D-La., right, meets with Doria Dee Johnson, the great-great-granddaughter of a lynching victim.
By Dennis Cook, AP

Crawford's alleged crime? Fighting with a white storeowner he believed was trying to cheat him.

Crawford's lynching took place on Oct. 21, 1916. On Monday, more than 100 of his descendants came to Washington to hear the Senate apologize for doing nothing to stop Crawford's murder and the lynchings of thousands of others over decades.

"It's really all the Senate can do now, is apologize," said Doria Dee Johnson, Crawford's great-great-granddaughter.

The resolution, approved by voice vote, "expresses the deepest sympathies and most solemn regret of the Senate to the descendants of the victims of lynchings, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the constitutional protections accorded to all citizens of the United States."

Sponsored by Sens. George Allen, R-Va., and Mary Landrieu, D-La., the resolution pointed out that 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress during the first half of the 20th century, and the House approved three.

But the Senate failed to pass any of them, sometimes because powerful Southern lawmakers derailed the efforts through use of the filibuster, or extended debate.

Landrieu said children were let out of Sunday school, shops were closed and special trains were scheduled so as many people as possible could witness the brutal slayings.

"This was a community spectacle and the Senate knew it," Landrieu said. "This was really an act of domestic terrorism."

Landrieu said she was moved to sponsor the resolution by a book of photographs of lynchings called Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.

Lynchings took hold during Reconstruction after the Civil War. From 1882 to 1968, there were 4,743 documented cases. They occurred in nearly every state. Four out of five victims were black.

According to the Tuskegee Institute archives, Mississippi led the nation in lynchings with 581, followed by Georgia with 531, Texas with 493, Louisiana with 391 and Alabama with 347.

Allen said he was asked to sponsor the resolution, co-sponsored by 75 of the 100 senators, by activist Dick Gregory.

Allen called the lynchings "a stain on the history of the United States Senate."

"We had to say we're sorry and we'll do better in the future," he said.

James Cameron, 91, the only known survivor of a lynching, also witnessed the Senate's apology.

Cameron was a 16-year-old shoeshine boy in Marion, Ind., in 1930 when he was dragged from a county jail by a mob that hung two of his teenage friends. The trio was suspected of murdering a white man and raping his white girlfriend. The girlfriend later denied in court that she had been harmed.

Cameron said he had the rope around his neck when someone in the crowd said, "Take this boy back, he had nothing to do with it."

"I was saved by a miracle," Cameron said.

Some offenses get apologies

In 1988, Congress apologized to Japanese-Americans held in camps during World War II and gave each $20,000.

In 1993, Congress apologized to native Hawaiians for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii a century before.

In 1997, President Clinton apologized for the government's "Tuskegee experiment" on 399 black men, who unknowingly were left untreated for syphilis to study its effects.

In 1997, Rep. Tony Hall, D-Ohio, proposed an apology for slavery. Three years later, black congressional leaders joined him in a broader effort to include a monument to slavery and a study on the feasibility of reparations. Nothing passed.

In 1998, Clinton declined to apologize on his trip to Africa for U.S. involvement in the slave trade. He expressed regret. Similarly, during his trip to Africa in 2003, President Bush denounced slavery as "one of the greatest crimes of history."

By Wendy Koch