ALONG THE COLOR LINE — AUGUST 2005

Most white Americans today have a dim recognition that lynchings of some African Americans unfortunately happened in the distant past in the United States. But few comprehend just how prevalent and popular these criminal acts were, or that thousands of whites—some of their grandparents and parents—eagerly participated in these atrocities.

Of the thousands of well-documented cases of lynchings during the past century, two particularly stand out for me.  In Omaha, Nebraska, on the evening of September 28, 1919, a white mob of five thousand surrounded and raided the county courthouse, where an African-American male was being held, charged with assaulting a white female.  The black man was seized from the local authorities, and then was publicly executed.  His body was shot an estimated one thousand times.  For good measure, the mutilated corpse was burned.  Dozens of defiant, smiling white men, many wearing white shirts, neckties and business suits, posed proudly around the charred corpse for souvenir photographs.

In Marion, Indiana, on August 7, 1930, a massive white mob stormed the jail in the local county courthouse, seizing two incarcerated African-American teenagers, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who had been accused of raping a white woman. Within less than an hour, a festive gathering of several thousand white women and men armed with baseball bats, crowbars and guns beat and then lynched the two black boys. A photograph of the Marion lynching depicts smiling young adults, a pregnant woman, teenage girls and a middle-aged man, pointing proudly to one of the dangling corpses.

A third young African American, a sixteen-year-old shoeshine boy named James Cameron, was also seized and beaten by the mob that night.  Several men lifted Cameron up, and a noose was slipped around his neck.  Just at that moment, a local white man in the crowd pushed forward and declared that young Cameron was innocent.

Years later, on June 13, 2005, speaking at a U.S. Senate news conference, 91-year-old James Cameron recalled: “They took the rope off my neck, those hands that had been so rough and ready to kill or had already killed, they took the rope off my neck and they allowed me to start walking and stager back to jail, which was just a half-block away.”

Cameron, the only known survivor of an attempted lynching, had come to the Capitol as part of an effort to obtain a formal apology from the Senate for its historic refusal to pass federal legislation outlawing lynching.  For decades, Southern senators had filibustered legislative attempts to ratify anti-lynching legislation, denouncing such bills as unnecessary interference with states’ rights.  Prompted by the emotional testimony of Cameron and the family members and descendants of lynching victims, the Senate finally issued an apology for lynching—the first time in United States history that Congress has acknowledged and expressed regret for historical crimes against African Americans—in a formal resolution.

What was most significant, perhaps, was that only eighty-five of the one hundred U.S. senators had co-sponsored the resolution when it came up for a voice vote.  All fifteen senators who did not initially co-sponsor the bill were Republicans.

Belatedly, seven senators subsequently signed an oversized copy of the senate’s anti-lynching resolution which was to be publicly displayed.  The eight senators who still refused to concede an apology are Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee); Thad Cochran (R-Mississippi), John Cornyn (R-Texas), Michael Enzi (R-Wyoming, Judd Gregg (R-New Hampshire), Trent Lott (R-Mississippi), John Sununu (R-New Hampshire), and Craig Thomas (R-Wyoming).

So what if thousands of innocent African Americans perished violently?  To these white Republicans, “lynching” was an American tradition—without apologies.