Brownwood's Republican Senators assailed on Lynching Apology

Brownwood's Lynching History - Who killed Lawrence Earl Jackson ?
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" Central Texas was practically ground zero for lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Of the approximately 4,700 documented lynchings – mostly of African-Americans between 1880 and 1930 – about 500 took place in Texas. That's more than any state other than Georgia and Mississippi, and our senators should have been at the forefront. "
see entire article posted below: Patricia Bernstein: Legacy of shame
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NAACP criticizes Hutchison, Cornyn
Senators assailed on lynching apology; aides say they backed measure
08:34 PM CDT on Thursday, June 16, 2005
By TODD J. GILLMAN / The Dallas Morning News
WASHINGTON – The nation's leading civil rights group criticized Texas' senators on Thursday for not co-sponsoring the Senate's apology for its failure to outlaw lynching decades ago.
All but 14 of 100 senators signed onto the resolution of apology, which passed unanimously this week – without objection and without a roll call vote. Neither Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison nor John Cornyn were among the co-sponsors.
"There's clearly a difference between not objecting and working to see to its passage," said Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau. "The position they took seems to be one of indifference. If you look at the problem of lynching when it was in its heyday, it was a problem because good people did nothing. ... And they [the Texas senators] did nothing."
Senate records show that 18 of the co-sponsors signed the day the resolution was passed, and seven signed a day or two afterward, taking advantage of a little-used rule. Liberal blogs have excoriated the holdouts, accusing them of insensitivity or overt racism.
The Texas senators, both Republicans, maintain they supported the apology but saw no reason to co-sponsor it.
"You don't need to co-sponsor something to be in favor of it. There's many things that pass the Senate every day that many people don't co-sponsor," said Hutchison spokesman Chris Paulitz. "Sen. Hutchison abhors lynching and believes it was a horrific part of our past – and as we saw with the James Byrd [Jr.] incident, [in] our not too distant past."
In 1998, Mr. Byrd, a black man, was chained to a pickup by three white men and dragged to death in Jasper, Texas. Ms. Hutchison was the highest-ranking state official at his funeral.
Passage was assured by the time it was circulated to Ms. Hutchison's office, Mr. Paulitz said, and aides saw no need to urge her to sign, especially since she rarely co-sponsors bills that she didn't help write.
Cornyn spokesman Don Stewart said a number of misguided complaints have reached the office in the past few days, from callers who wanted to know why he supports lynching. Some erroneously believed that he voted against the resolution.
"It was a unanimous vote, and his vote shows that he supported what the resolution said," Mr. Stewart said. "Lynching is illegal at the local, state and federal level and has been for a long time. This was a resolution about what the Senate filibustered years ago. ... This was supposed to be a somber, sincere reflection on the mistakes of the past, and it's become a political cudgel for some that want to misconstrue the nature of the process."
Mr. Cornyn inserted comments of support in the Senate record, calling the "era of widespread lynching in our nation's history deplorable."
According to the NAACP, there were 4,742 documented lynchings in 43 states from 1882 to 1968.
From 1920 to 1940, the U.S. House passed anti-lynching bills three times. But Southern lawmakers choked the proposals in the Senate. Historians and civil rights groups – including the NAACP, founded as a direct response to lynchings – blame the Senate's inaction for later waves of violence and for resistance to voting rights and desegregation.
The resolution of apology was written by Sens. George Allen, a Virginia Republican, and Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat.
E-mail tgillman@dallasnews.com
source: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/washington/stories/061705dnnatlynching.17db2820.html
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Patricia Bernstein: Legacy of shame
In 1916 in Waco, a crowd of thousands cheered as a 17-year-old was lynched. 'We're sorry' is only a start.
12:02 AM CDT on Friday, June 17, 2005
It is refreshing to see that the Senate has passed a resolution apologizing for its role, over many decades, in blocking federal anti-lynching legislation. Of course, it says a lot about the glacial pace of racial healing that this moment didn't arrive until 2005, but it is a positive move, nonetheless.

Oddly, neither Texas senator is among the 85 resolution co-sponsors, although the office of Sen. Mary Landreau, D-La., the sponsor, says Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison did sign on late as a "supporter."
Central Texas was practically ground zero for lynchings during the Jim Crow era. Of the approximately 4,700 documented lynchings – mostly of African-Americans between 1880 and 1930 – about 500 took place in Texas. That's more than any state other than Georgia and Mississippi, and our senators should have been at the forefront.
One of the worst atrocities of the lynching era was the public torture and murder of an illiterate 17-year-old black farm laborer named Jesse Washington on May 15, 1916, behind Waco City Hall. He was beaten, stabbed, hanged and burned in front of 10,000 cheering spectators. The shouts, one newspaper account read, "were like those a crowd will give when leading a triumphal procession from a ball game that has been a big victory."
The fledgling NAACP, founded only seven years earlier, used this episode to launch a vigorous anti-lynching campaign. Elisabeth Freeman, a young white veteran of the militant wing of the women's suffrage movement, was sent to Waco to investigate. Using wiles she had acquired in years of street-corner speechmaking and demonstrating, she got the names of the lynch-mob leaders and photos taken by a local commercial photographer.
W.E.B. Du Bois then wrote about the incident in unflinching detail in a special supplement to the NAACP magazine, The Crisis. The NAACP sent that supplement to President Woodrow Wilson, his Cabinet, every member of Congress and a long list of newspapers.
Efforts to find a Texas lawyer to bring charges against the mob leaders failed, but the NAACP was learning that even without legal action, publicity could shame a town into taking action to prevent future lynchings. Towns like Waco, which Mr. Du Bois described as "alert, pushing and rich," were learning that lynchings, when widely publicized, were bad for business.
The NAACP's most effective tool in those dark days was publicity, because local juries simply would not convict lynchers. In the South, it was unusual for a lynch-mob leader to be indicted, much less convicted, and local officials often orchestrated or even participated in lynchings. Thus, the campaign for federal legislation.
In January 1922, less than six years after Jesse Washington was slain and partly because of the hard work of the NAACP, the U.S. House passed an anti-lynching bill that provided for fines and imprisonment of officials who allowed lynchings to occur or failed to prosecute lynchers.
Similar bills passed the House in 1937 and 1940. Each time, Southern senators prevented the bill from even coming up for a vote in their chamber.
Federal legislation, had it passed and been enforced, might have helped bring a quick close to the lynching epidemic. Because of the power of racist Southern senators, however, lynching petered out slowly, retreating from daylight and larger towns and public squares to smaller communities and rural areas, where it was performed in secret, often in the dead of night, by small groups of increasingly marginalized characters.
There's no way to know how many lives might have been saved if anti-lynching legislation had been passed and enforced in 1922. But the failure to pass it was, beyond question, one of the Senate's more inglorious chapters. How sad that even today, the tragic story of Jesse Washington and nearly 500 other Texas victims did not interest our senators enough for them to vigorously co-sponsor the apology resolution.
Many communities today struggle to deal with these ugly old stories, some now being exposed or told in detail for the first time. These episodes of barbarity must be recognized and atoned for in some way, most importantly to educate our children about the consequences of allowing bigotry to flourish unchecked.
Waco and other lynching towns should follow the Senate's lead and find a way – whether it be a marker, a memorial, a garden or a scholarship – to formally acknowledge and apologize for the worst horrors of Jim Crow.
Houston author Patricia Bernstein wrote "The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP" (Texas A&M University Press). Her e-mail address is patricia@patriciabernstein.com.
source: http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/061705dnedibernstein.177fe37f.html