ETERNAL VIGILANCE

U.S. Senate Apologises over Lynchings

June 14, 2005
BBC Online

The US Senate has apologised for spending decades blocking efforts to make lynchings and mob violence against black Americans a federal crime.

Nearly 5,000 Americans - mostly black males - are documented as having been lynched between 1880 and 1960.

About 200 relatives of victims - and the only known lynching survivor alive today - witnessed the Senate apologise.

Senators repeatedly blocked anti-lynching legislation from being approved by Congress.

Nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced, three of which made it past the lower House of Representatives between 1920 and 1940.

But despite the support of seven US presidents, the Senate stopped any of them becoming law.

By making lynching a federal crime, the legislation would have allowed the central US government to prosecute those responsible, and overcome opposition from local police forces, who were often complicit in the crimes.

"There may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility," said Senator Mary Landrieu, who introduced the apology resolution.

Still prejudice

The text apologises for the Senate's failure to act and "expresses the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching".

The vote was passed without opposition - though 20 of the 100 senators did not put their names to a statement supporting it.

Dan Duster, a descendant of anti-lynching crusader Ida B Wells, criticised those who did not sign.

"I think it's politics. They're afraid of losing votes from people of prejudice," he said.

'I escaped noose'

Among the others in Washington was James Cameron, 91, who was one of three people abducted from jail in Indiana to be hanged by a mob in 1930.

As a noose was tightened round the 16-year-old's neck, someone in the crowd spoke up for him and he was reprieved. His two friends died.

"The apology is a good idea, but it still won't bring anyone back," said Mr Cameron.

"I hope that the next time it won't take so long to admit to our mistakes."

The resolution was proposed by Sen Landrieu, and Senator George Allen, from Virginia, after they read a pictorial history of racist violence: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.

Black people made up three-quarters of those lynched, but were not the only victims.

The apology coincides with the trial of a 79-year-old man over the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers - two of them white - in Mississippi.

Lynching victims are not the first to receive an apology from Congress. Apologies have also been offered to other persecuted groups, including Japanese-Americans.

But the potential scale of reparation payments has complicated attempts to win an apology to blacks for slavery.

Relatives of lynching victims make up a much smaller group.

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Editor's comment: Leave it to the crew over at the BBC to bollocks up the works. This is just more of the same muddle-headed political correctness coming from those slithering serpents on Capitol Hill.

Whether or not the Senate has blocked such things in the past is irrelevant.

What is important to see is that by making murder (and lynching is just that) a federal crime, these idiots are playing into the hands of those who would destroy the tattered remnants of our constitutional Republic.

And it gives pause to wonder how many of these solons might just be in cahoots with those intent on the continued subversion and destruction of our culture and heritage, which includes the basis of our law from its English and European roots.

This in turn causes more federal encroachment into the affairs of the several states thus expanding the central leviathan. We need less government intrusion into out lives and local affairs. It is up to the citizens locally to garner the intellectual honesty and courage that is required of them to police our elected officials who are nothing more than our servants.

Murder is already a capital offense and making a particular form of it a federal crime is specious reasoning and a tool of those who would destroy the checks and balances in our system of government which would turn this country into a police state.

We are already there and the continued attacks of the neocons, in particular the plans of John Bolton to reform the U.N. are mere window dressing to invite U.N. troops to takepart in rounding up American dissidents and dissenters en masse.

As Rep. Ron Paul of Texas so clearly points out, this plan by Bolton, id est, the White House, is simply another chilling aspect of Neocon Global Government.

This is the same subversion of state sovereignty on a global scale as we have seen on a national scale here in the U.S.

And it is all the more illegitimate since the U.N. has no more authority to do it to the countries of the world than does the federal government to the states.

This is only a tool for repression and tyranny. It is all too apparent if one looks critically at the goings on in the U.S. and compares it to what is happening on the international scene as incidents of the same type of tyranny rises in ever increasing numbers.

As far as lynching goes, it is beyond the realm of the intellectual honesty spoken of above to consider such a thing which is clearly outside the rule of law.

But, there most certainly are some neocon traitors and corporate swindlers, including a passle of banksters, who deserve a good, stout, short rope and a tall tree, or, in the alternative, the hangman's gallows after they have been given a fair trial and found guilty of their crimes against the people.