Ghosts of Enormous Wrongs

By: Marc H. Morial
President and CEO
National Urban League

Once upon a time in America, even for the better part of a century after their emancipation from slavery, African Americans were marooned in a vast sea of cruelty.

They had no rights—to liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness, or life—any white person needed to respect.

This assertion, the foundation of white supremacist doctrine, was effectively affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States twice in the 19th century.

And much of White America eagerly put it into practice, especially in the South.

The most brutal expression of the exile and lack of protection African Americans endured in their native land was lynching—a maelstrom of violence that often involved not only hanging but gruesome torture and mutilation.

It raged unchecked in the United States for more than half a century, even as America fought two world wars to make, it boasted, the world safe for democracy.

Now, the Senate of the United States has approved an historic declaration: an apology for its refusal to pass anti-lynching legislation during the late 19th century and first half of the 20th that could have aided efforts to stop the epidemic of racist crime Representative John Lewis, Democrat of Georgia, and a former civil rights activist, has called "the American holocaust."

Whereas the crime of lynching succeeded slavery as the ultimate expression of racism… Senate Resolution 39 begins, and goes on to list some of the sobering facts about this great crime:

At least 4,742 people of all ethnic groups but overwhelmingly African-American were lynched between 1882 and 1968.

Many who've studied lynching assert the actual numbers of blacks murdered are two and perhaps three times higher.

They also contend that, contrary to the conventional wisdom about lynchings of blacks, most of those slain were not even suspected of having committed a crime—indeed, many of them were ordinary working people, and not a few were prominent landowners or businessmen—and that many of those who were suspected of criminal behavior rarely received anything approaching a fair trial.

Despite the fact that many lynchings were public events that drew hundreds and sometimes thousands of whites, 99 percent of the perpetrators were never punished by state or local officials.

From 1900 to 1950 more than 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress, and on three occasions between 1920 and 1940 the House of Representatives itself passed anti-lynching legislation.

But the block of Senators from the South, which controlled the Upper Chamber during these decades, used the threadbare doctrine of states rights to mask their support for maintaining white supremacy by any means necessary.

Thankfully, more than 50 Senators have joined the two lead co-sponsors of Senate Resolution 39, Mary Landrieu, Democrat, of Louisiana, and George Allen, Republican, of Virginia, in apologizing to the victims of these horrendous crimes and their descendants, and in vowing to remember "the history of lynching, to ensure that these tragedies will neither be forgotten nor repeated."

Landrieu told the Washington Post, her idea for the resolution was prompted by the 1999 book, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, by James Allen. An exhibition drawn from the book has been touring the country since its publication, and, along with several other recent, powerful books on lynching, has provoked a renewed determination to explore this part of American history fully.

The resolution's understated, poignant words, I'm sure, vividly recall for the victims' descendants and many other Americans those long decades when, primarily in the South, episodes of almost unfathomable racist savagery could occur at any moment.

Although, as Senator Allen has said, an apology is "long overdue," I can't help but think that Fate has had a hand in leading us to this moment—when an extraordinary confluence of events have put America's twentieth-century racial past front and center.

Among them are: the beginning of the trial in Philadelphia, Mississippi of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen, an avowed segregationist and former high official of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan, for the infamous murder of three civil rights workers in the summer of 1964; the continued re-opened federal investigation of the 1955 murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, which also occurred in Mississippi; and the continued, proper quest of survivors and descendants of other victims of the 1921 pogrom that leveled the black neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma for full justice and compensation to a communal fund.

These unforgettable events so occupy our present because they are peopled by ghosts of enormous wrongs, people who were cast into a void of injustice, "deprived," as Senate Resolution 39 declares, "of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protection accorded all citizens of the United States."

Until those inalienable rights are restored to them, our American ancestors, by a just accounting of the past, none of us living today can be assured they are guaranteed to us, either.

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