Senate Apologizes for Lynching-Ban Delays

[Jahness]

Senate Apologizes for Lynching-Ban Delays

By REBECCA CARROLL
Associated Press Writer

June 14, 2005, 8:44 AM CDT

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 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.
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The bill is S. Res. 39.
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On the Net:

Sen. Mary Landrieu: http://landrieu.senate.gov/
Sen. George Allen: http://allen.senate.gov/

chicagotribune.com

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...ck=1&cset=true
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/n...ck=1&cset=true
Copyright © 2005, The Associated Press

[Jahness]

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[nattyreb]

Thanks, Sis. Jahness, for always keeping the forum fresh with topical info so consistently. Being a conspiracy-oriented thinker, i have to think that this coupled with the trial of the *one* white man charged with the murders of 3 civil rights workers seems to be a response to the reparations movement as well as the many pleas for action around the current lynchings of our bros. and sis. on the streets of our cities by the police and their agents. They must be feeling some type of pressure to even initiate these types of actions, perhaps hoping it will give them a healthy retort when they're asked why they continually ignore the righteous demands for reparations and the growing wild west mentality among these jack-booted thugs. Now they believe they can say they "done something" for black people, when they've skipped over the key issue of slavery as a holocaust, a crime against humanity. To do that, they well know, will more broadly open the door to demand redress as reparations, which is done all over the world. Hopefully the reparations movement will take the momentum of this apology for lynching and use it as new fiyah in the arsenal.

[nattyreb]

This says it better than i ever could!
=======================


THE MEANINGLESS APOLOGY ON LYNCHING
By Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, The Black Commentator
Posted on June 17, 2005, Printed on June 17, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/22248/

16 JUNE 2005
ISSUE 142
http://www.blackcommentator.com/142/..._lynching.html

The vast bulk of black Americans see the "apology" for what it is
-- a scam, with no substantial benefits, and less good faith.


Why are some black folks so happy to hear an apology from people who don't mean it?

There are nearly a million African-Americans in prison - one out of eight inmates on the planet - a gulag of monstrous proportions, clearly designed to perpetuate the social relations that began with slavery. We demand an end to those relations, not an insincere, risk-free "apology" that sets not one prisoner free.

It is appropriate that the great anti-lynching leader, Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), who documented the murder of nearly 5,000 blacks at the hands of white mobs in the terror-filled years that followed the death of Reconstruction, be verbally honored by Louisiana Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu and Virginia Republican Senator George Allen. Yet both senators supported laws that will impose draconian equivalents of post-Civil War "black codes" on inner city youth, who will now be designated as criminal conspirators if they congregate in groups of three or more.

No thank you, Senators Landrieu and Allen - the crime you committed against us in May vastly outweighs your weak apology in June. You have guaranteed that hundreds of thousands more young black people will be interned in your gulag - a crime against humanity. And both of you are determined to commit more crimes. Should we ask for an apology in advance?

There can be no absolution for those who continue to profit from past crimes, and plot new ones. Lynch law was the effective law of the South - and, truth be told, the rest of the United States - and the "lawful" authorities sanctioned it by refusing to pass 200 anti-lynching bills. The terror of lynching created the social relationships that resulted in white households accumulating ten to twenty times as much wealth as black households - our collective national inheritance. An apology will not do.

Is that what our movement has been about all of these generations - to get an apology from people who became rich on our backs? There is a method to this racist madness, an assumption that African-Americans can be bought by a simple nod from a few white people. Some of these racists will not even give us a nod - the twelve or sixteen senators who did not join in the anti-lynching vote, all but one of them Republicans. The Republican Senate Leader made sure that no member would have to go on record against lynching. However, are we supposed to be grateful for a non-binding resolution that admits thousands of murders were committed with the complicity of the United States government, but that does not redress the wrongs in any way.

Where is the sense of justice in this apology? What do the descendants of the terrorized class expect? That wrongs be righted, or that those who have profited gain absolution?

Lynching was genocide

The United States Senate did not ratify the Convention on Genocide until 1988, 40 years after African-Americans circulated the petition, "We Charge Genocide," in an effort to make international law applicable to the U.S. By this time, most of the former Dixiecrats had become Republicans, and felt safe in blaming their former party for their own crimes.

The United States, controlled by a Republican majority and feckless minority of white Democrats whose greatest fear is their black constituents, is now engaged in a grand venture to export the ideology of white terror, planet-wide. They have not learned a thing. Having never practiced democracy on their own shores, they claim a copyright to the concept. The fact that nobody believes their claims does not phase them, because they are marching to the tune of Manifest Destiny - the white man's right to rule. It is that belief that drew tens of thousands of whites to the lynching fields of Georgia and Indiana, for the sport of Negro-killing. Now they are in Iraq and Afghanistan, claiming moral authority.

The march of civilization goes on, leaving the United States behind. The bubble of news communication fools only those inside. The rest of the globe sees its own interests, and recognizes white arrogance, intuitively.

This intuitive knowledge, born of gruesome experience, also informs black Americans. Although surrounded by the same bubble of misinformation as the rest of Americans, blacks smell the lie. The vast bulk of us see the "apology" for what it is - a scam, with no substantial benefits, and less good faith. But there is a class that is paid to say "Yes sir," on command. Most of us pay them no attention.

Lynch law was no law at all. It was pure white power - the right to declare oneself a higher form of being, and reduce the "other" to charcoal. The current rulers of the United States are spreading lynch law to the far reaches of the planet. They claim the right to "pre-emptive" warfare, and reject all other people's rights to live under collectively accepted rules. They wage war against the concept of international law, just as they violated every law that did not enshrine white privilege.

Nothing has changed, except the world. We will not tolerate such criminality, anymore. In fact, we have collectively called the behavior that white folks in the United States routinely engaged in, criminal. It's far too late for the U.S. Senate to pass a non-binding resolution announcing some vague objection to lynching, when they pass legislation that makes it a crime to be black and a youth, vote billions to fund a military machine that seeks to enslave the planet, and rejects the authority of the World Criminal Court. In doing so, they have made themselves outlaws.

We will not forgive, or accept an apology that does not come with a change in power relationships. And we will reject any so-called black leadership that makes its own deal.


BlackCommentator.com co-publishers Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are writing a book on Barack Obama and the crisis of black political leadership.

2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

[Jahness]

Originally Posted by nattyreb

Thanks, Sis. Jahness, for always keeping the forum fresh with topical info so consistently. Being a conspiracy-oriented thinker, i have to think that this coupled with the trial of the *one* white man charged with the murders of 3 civil rights workers seems to be a response to the reparations movement as well as the many pleas for action around the current lynchings of our bros. and sis. on the streets of our cities by the police and their agents. They must be feeling some type of pressure to even initiate these types of actions, perhaps hoping it will give them a healthy retort when they're asked why they continually ignore the righteous demands for reparations and the growing wild west mentality among these jack-booted thugs. Now they believe they can say they "done something" for black people, when they've skipped over the key issue of slavery as a holocaust, a crime against humanity. To do that, they well know, will more broadly open the door to demand redress as reparations, which is done all over the world. Hopefully the reparations movement will take the momentum of this apology for lynching and use it as new fiyah in the arsenal.

Greetings sister nattyreb!

Thank you so much for taking the time out to discuss this important
issue with us al here in the forum. I agree with you wholeheartedly
on all points.

yt are just playing their games as usual, simply as you stated they
want to smetime in the future say they have given back something
to us a s a people.

Our Afrikan holocust and proper reparations are what we want yt to
be taking care of immediately.

Much appreciation to you for posting the additional relevent article.
The information is right on point.

It's always a pleasure reasoning with you my beloved sister!

Peace & Blessings!