Brownwood's Republican Senators did not support Senate lynching apology !

U.S. Senate apologizes for 100 years of lynchings
By Frank James Washington Bureau Tue Jun 14, 9:40 AM ET
The Senate apologized Monday to lynching victims and their descendants, a belated attempt to make amends for what some lawmakers acknowledged was the Senate's shameful 19th and 20th Century history of blocking efforts to end the grisly practice of lynching African-Americans.
With the survivor of a lynching and families of victims watching from the Senate's visitors' gallery, Sen. Mary Landrieu (news, bio, voting record), a Louisiana Democrat and main sponsor of the legislation calling for a rare Senate apology, spoke with an unusual visual aid. It was a gruesome 1930s-era photo of a black lynching victim hanging from a tree as a white mob, including children, looked on, with many of them smiling.
"The Senate was wrong not to act," she said, referring to the chamber's repeated failure over a nearly 100-year period to support the efforts of the House and seven presidents to make lynching a federal crime.
Those efforts were undone over the decades by filibusters by Southern senators, either racists themselves or unwilling to anger racist constituents. Available records indicate mobs, often with the complicity of local officials, lynched at least 4,742 people, three-fourths of them black, between 1882 and 1968.
"That was wrong to not stand in the way of the mob," Landrieu said. "We lacked courage then. We perhaps don't have all the courage we need today to do everything that we should do.
"But I know that we can apologize today," she said. "We can be sincere in our apology to the families, to their loved ones, and perhaps now we can set some of these victims and their families free and most of all set our country free to be better than it is today."
But even as a majority of the Senate--80 lawmakers as of the time of Monday night's vote--signed onto Landrieu's resolution, there was a sense of the unfinished business still before America when it comes to race relations.
That all 100 senators didn't unanimously sign onto the apology seemed to bear out writer William Faulkner's line that "the past is never dead; it's not even past."
As a condition of getting the apology legislation to a point where it could be approved by the Senate, its supporters had to settle for a voice vote instead of the more typical roll-call vote where each vote is individually recorded. There was, however, no audible opposition when the vote was taken.
Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), the Democratic 2004 presidential nominee, said, "I think it's critical that we take the step we're taking and have taken, but at the same time wouldn't it have been just that much more extraordinary and significant if we were having a recorded vote with all 100 senators recording their votes? We're not."
Many of the senators cited the book "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America" as a major spur to the action.
Landrieu and others cited the casual brazenness of the spectators and perpetrators as one of the most troubling aspects of the photos because it suggested they had little to fear of being brought to justice. The traveling photographic exhibit on which the book is based is on display at the Chicago Historical Society.
In one of the day's many ironies, it was two Southern senators who spearheaded the apology, Landrieu and Sen. George Allen (news, bio, voting record) (R-Va.).
"This august body has a stain on its history," Allen said of the Senate's previous failures to take a stand against lynching. "And that stain is lynching."
Another irony was that the apology was approved on the same day as the start of the Mississippi trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a reputed Ku Klux Klan leader who is charged in the murders of three civil rights workers in 1964. Philip Dray, author of another book on lynchings, "At the Hands of Persons Unknown," said it's uncertain what would have happened if the Senate had passed anti-lynching legislation, but its failure had the effect of galvanizing opposition to lynching.
Lynchings and legal inaction led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. It also gave a major impetus to the civil rights movement.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the Senate's only African-American, said, "I do hope that as we commemorate this past injustice that this chamber also spends some time however doing something concrete and tangible to heal the long shadow of slavery and the legacy of racial discrimination so that 100 years from now we can look back and be proud and not having to apologize once again."
"There are more ways to perpetrate violence than simply a lynching," he said. "There's the violence that we subject young children to when they don't have any opportunities, when they have no hope . . . . That's the kind of violence this chamber could do something about."
Descendants of victims seemed inclined to accept the Senate's action, as did James Cameron, 91, of Milwaukee, who was lynched in Marion, Ind., in 1930, when he was 16, but survived.
"We believe an apology is the beginning," said Doria Dee Johnson, 44, of Evanston, Ill. Her great-great-grandfather, Anthony Crawford, was a farmer in Abbeville, S.C., and pillar of the black community, who was lynched in 1916 after a dispute with a white farmer.
"It takes a lot for people to admit when they're wrong" she said. "For the Senate to do it as a body I think is courageous. We haven't seen this sort of statement from the U.S. Senate."
fjames@tribune.com
source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/chitribts/20050614/ts_chicagotrib/ussenateapologizesfor100yearsoflynchings;_ylt=ApyObK8XZtmpMIX7oykG2u_pbr8F;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl
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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.
source: http://www.blackcommentator.com/142/142_cover_lynching_pf.html
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