Like Water for Chocolate: Senate Apologizes for Ignoring Lynching

You may have missed it with all the hoopla about Michael Jackson, but on the same day (June 13, 2005) the Senate passed a resolution apologizing and expressing regret for the moral failure of ignoring the almost 200 anti-lynching bills that were introduced to Congress during an eighty-year period. From 1880 to 1960 approximately 4,749 people (men, women and children) were lynched in the United States. Seventy five percent of those lynched were black.

Senators Mary Landrieu (LA-D) and George Allen (VA-R) sponsored the resolution. Landrieu and Allen claim they were moved to propose the chamber’s repentance after seeing photographs in the book Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (published in 2000), edited by James Allen. Of course it rings hollow that these two Southerners, Landrieu (is at least 40 from the looks of things) and George Allen (born in 1952) were ignorant of lynching until they happened across a book published in the year 2000. For the sake of argument, however, I will grant that their first encounter with this national phenomenon we call “lynching” was in a coffee table picture book. When viewing the pictures, I hope what really tore their heartstrings were not the ghastly scenes of “strange fruit” twisting on the branches of a strong old tree, but rather the sight of the mob of whites, men, women and children, standing around the tree, taking pictures, posing, selling postcards of the event, laughing, taking relics of bits of skin, teeth, nails and bones and gesturing proudly at the camera, unashamed of murder.

This apology vexes me the way the Killen trial vexes me. Once again, we are falling headlong into atonement and the perpetrator model of discrimination. It is not heroic, healing or even moral to deliver mealy-mouthed regret about past bad acts when contemporaneously many of these same politicians are engaged in a heated battle to dismantle systems in our government that guard against just the type of mob rule that led to lynchings. If you have not been in a persistent vegetative state for the last few months, you have seen Senators push for the elimination of the few anti-majoritarian checks in our system: the filibuster and an independent judiciary. You have been witness to an alarming trend of politicians crying mightily for the professional lynching of judges who don’t do their bidding. Mob rule and the duplicitous silence of those who know better is no less reprehensible today than it was in the nineteenth century. Judges are not beholden to politicians, a small majority may not rule with an iron fist and the Constitution is difficult to amend because we want to encourage slow, deliberative, consensual problem-solving, not a gentleman’s mob rule. We have seen governments in which all the power is concentrated in one person or one party and we are generally disappointed with the results: they tend towards human rights abuses and we suggest “regime change” for their remediation. Let us therefore tread thoughtfully into the realm of absolute majority rule.

Generally, I appreciate an apology, especially a timely one that is heartfelt and means that the supplicant will change his ways. I simply don’t think the Senate resolution fulfills either requirement.

I suppose an apology, however, is better than no apology at all. Therefore, I, YG&B, on behalf of myself and other like-minded folks, accept your apology, U.S. Senate. We may be atoned, but we are not assuaged.

Thank you.

***I have tried my level best not to blast Condoleezza Rice for, in the wake of the apology, coming up with a me-too lynching story about her grandfather's experiences as she sits in an Administration that refuses to admit any mistakes with respect to the torture of suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Iraq and Afghanistan. The Administration has defined those prisoners in such a way that they do not have any rights or representation. They are dying in our custody. Do you see what I mean about absolute power?

Some additional links on lynching:

The Sun News

Lynching Statistics