WASHINGTON (ABP) — The United States Senate has offered a belated apology for something it repeatedly failed to do: Stop a century of lynchings that killed thousands of African-Americans and other minorities.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, white mobs would hang or otherwise murder minorities or immigrants accused of real or imagined offenses, almost always without being prosecuted and predominantly in the South.
In an acknowledgement of that history, the Senate's chief sponsors of the anti-lynching resolution, passed June 13, were two white Southerners — Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and George Allen (R-Va.) — who were joined by 78 co-sponsors.
“Without question, there have been other grave injustices committed in the noble exercise of establishing this great democracy,” Landrieu said, introducing the bill on the Senate floor. “However, there may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility. In refusing to take up legislation passed by the House of Representatives on three separate occasions and requested by seven presidents from William Henry Harrison to Harry Truman, the Senate engaged in a different kind of culpability.”
The voice vote means no objection to the bill was recorded. However, while most Southern senators signed on as co-sponsors, six did not. They were Republicans Richard Shelby of Alabama, Thad Cochran and Trent Lott of Mississippi, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, and John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas.
The bill itself cites 4,742 reports of lynchings in the United States between 1882 and 1968. The practice was particularly pronounced around the turn of the 20th century. Opinion polls by the 1930s showed large majorities of the public — even in the South — supported making lynching a federal offense. But on all three occasions, Southern senators blocked the House bills from floor votes. They claimed making lynching a federal offense would infringe on states' rights.
Allen, speaking in favor of his bill, noted that the lynch mobs were often not only tolerated by local authorities but led by them. “Many times these lynchings were not lone acts by a few white men. Rather, they were angry gangs,” he said. “They were occasions, they were events — mobs who were whipped into frenzies by the skewed mentalities of what is right and what is wrong. These cruel and unjust acts are so contrary to the rule of law, due process, and equal protection that we pride ourselves on in the United States.”
Indeed, historians note that many lynchings were civic events that drew large crowds. Besides hanging or burning their victims to death, the mobs would sometimes torture the victims — including blinding or castrating them — or mutilate their corpses after they died.
Newspapers sometimes ran photos of the events, some with the mob leaders posing next to the bodies. Mob participants or supporters even made postcards of such photos to mail as souvenirs.
Several senators cited a recently published collection of such photographs for moving them to action. Called Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, the book “helped bring greater awareness and proper recognition of the victims of lynching,” according to the resolution.
Senators received copies of the book that had been mailed to them by a group of activists calling themselves the Committee for a Formal Apology.
Members of the committee, including several relatives and descendants of lynching victims, had spent the hours prior to the resolution's passage visiting senators. Many of them watched from the Senate visitors' galleries during the apology's debate and passage.
The resolution also noted the practice was not limited to the South, or to African-American victims. According to a survey by the Tuskegee Institute, there were documented lynchings in all but four states. In addition, the victims included not only African-Americans but also Jews, Italian immigrants, Latinos, Asians and American Indians.
The anti-lynching resolution comes amid renewed attention to the race-related crimes of the civil-rights era. Earlier this year, federal officials announced they would reopen the investigation into the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American from Chicago who was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was accused of whistling at a white female store clerk.
On the day the Senate passed the resolution, the trial opened for a reputed Mississippi Ku Klux Klan member who allegedly was involved in the famous murder of three civil-rights workers near Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964.