Apoligozing to Lynching Victims and Their Descendants
APOLOGIZING TO LYNCHING VICTIMS AND THEIR DESCENDANTS
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Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, this is an issue that will be considered by the Senate later this evening, an issue of historic importance. It will be an official apology by the Senate for the Senate's failure to protect victims of lynching in America.
Fifty years ago, on August 20, 1955, a Chicago woman named Mamie Till took her 14-year-old son Emmett to the 63rd Street Station in Chicago to catch the southbound train to Mississippi. Emmett was going to spend the summer with his great uncle and aunt in a town called Money, MS, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.
The next day, August 21, 1955, young Emmett Till arrived in Mississippi. He spent the next few days helping out around the house, working with his great uncle, Moses Wright, in the cotton fields.
On August 24, after a long day of working in the fields, Emmett and a group of teenagers went into town to Bryant's Grocery Store for some refreshments. The store--owned by a White couple named Roy and Carolyn Bryant--served primarily Black workers, sharecroppers, and their kids. Emmett went into Bryant's Grocery Store to buy some bubble gum. Some kids who were hanging out outside the store accused Emmett of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, one of the proprietors of the store.
Four days later, on August 28, Carolyn Bryant's husband and his half brother went to Moses Wright's home at 2:30 in the morning. They kidnapped young Emmett Till from his bed, and they committed one of the most notorious and horrific lynchings in American history. They brutally beat this young man from Chicago, IL, Emmett Till. They gouged out his eyes, they shot him in the head, they tied a large metal fan around his neck with barbed wire, and they threw his mangled, dead body into the Tallahatchie River.
A few days later, his broken and bloated body was found floating in the river. Emmett Till was returned to his mother in Chicago in a coffin. On September 3, 1955, Mamie Till held a historic funeral for her son at Roberts Temple Church of God in Chicago. She did a courageous thing: She directed that the casket remain open so that everyone could see what hatred and racism had done to her little boy.
Tens of thousands of Chicagoans came to say goodbye to 14-year-old Emmett Till, a young man who just a few weeks before got on that train to visit his family in Mississippi. News coverage of that funeral reached millions more around the world. Jet Magazine made a historic decision: They decided to print actual photographs of Emmett Till's mutilated body lying in the casket and cover his funeral. The decision by that magazine and the publicity that came with Emmett Till's tragic death changed people across America. I cannot tell you how many African Americans I have met who said that the world changed after the murder of Emmett Till. They came to realize that what happened to him should not be allowed to happen in America.
One of my favorite friends in Congress, one of my heroes of all time, is a man named JOHN LEWIS. He represents Atlanta, GA, as a Member of the House of Representatives. He was one of the pioneers in the civil rights movement. He was 15 years old, 1 year older than Emmett Till, growing up in Alabama, when he saw those photographs of this young man. Like millions of African Americans, JOHN LEWIS was haunted by the image. He told a Washington Post reporter recently: I remember thinking it can happen to anyone, me or my brothers or my cousins. It created a sense of fear that it could happen to anyone who got out of line.
Those images of Emmett Till inspired more than fear. In many people, they inspired courage and resolve. There was a decision made by so many at every level of life in America to no longer ever tolerate the brutal inhumanity of hatred and racism of Jim Crow laws. When Rosa Parks, the legendary civil rights leader, refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, AL, it was 100 days after Emmett Till's murder. She said, when asked later: How did you show the strength to do that, stand up against everybody and say, no, I will not sit in the back of the bus, she said she got her courage by thinking of that young man, Emmett Till.
Eight years later, in a song entitled ``The Murder of Emmett Till,'' the great poet/songwriter Bob Dylan had the following lyrics:
If you can't speak out against this kind of thing,
a crime that's so unjust,
your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt,
your mind is filled with dust.
Today, 50 years after Emmett Till's brutal murder, the Senate will formally and officially offer apologies to not just the families of Emmett Till but the nearly 4,800 other Americans who died at the hands of lynch mobs in our country, in this great Nation of America, between 1882 and 1968. We offer our apologies as well to the countless millions of Americans who were forced to live with the fear that they could be the next victim.
Emmett Till's cousin, Simeon Wright, was lying next to Emmett the night he was kidnapped and lynched. Simeon Wright is with us today. Doria Johnson, from Evanston, IL, also is with us today. Her grandfather, Anthony Crawford, was lynched by a White mob in Abbeville, SC, in 1916. He was beaten, hanged, and shot more than 200 times. What kind of offense would merit that kind of punishment? What had Anthony Crawford done? Anthony Crawford, in 1916, in South Carolina, a Black man, got into an argument with a White man over the price of cotton seed at a store.
To them and to all who lost a loved one to lynching and to those who lost a piece of their own childhood and their own sense of security, we say today formally and officially in the Senate that we were wrong--wrong for failing to protect them, wrong because we never said we were sorry.
The murders of Emmett Till and Anthony Crawford are among those documented in a groundbreaking book and museum exhibit called ``Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.'' The exhibit has traveled all over the United States and opened just last week at the Chicago Historical Society.
Mr. President, just a few days ago, the Chicago Sun-Times did an editorial on this issue of lynching and this exhibit. I ask unanimous consent that the editorial be printed in the RECORD.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
[From the Chicago Sun-Times, June 12, 2005]
Exhibit of Lynching Photos Shows Evil we Must Remember
The Chicago Historical Society's ``Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography In America'' seems an unlikely exhibition to launch in a Northern city. But the link between Chicago and ``murder by a mob of an individual outside the confines of the legal system,'' a definition that comes halfway through the exhibit, is long-standing. It has been 50 years since Chicagoan Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi. That case is still with us.
Till's murder, for allegedly whistling at a white woman, shocked an entire nation and sparked the civil rights movement in the North, but lynching had gone on for decades. Journalist Ida Wells-Barnett was crusading against it in 1892 when three successful black businessmen were lynched. Through her fearless reporting, Barnett established that lynching was not the white man's response to a black man's abuse of white women, but that most lynchings were caused by ``economic competition and racial hatred.''
In 1893, Barnett stood outside the Chicago World's Fair and protested the exclusion of African Americans, while handing out copies of her pamphlet: ``Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases.'' Still, except for protest art such as Claude McKay's ``The Lynching'' and Billie Holiday's ``Strange Fruit,'' the sadistic killing of black Americans has mostly been hidden from America's mainstream.
The Chicago Historical Society's exhibit will change that. And it strikes us as fitting that photographs and documents, many of which are on loan from private collections, have ended up here. Although the re-opening of the Till murder case has sparked new interest in this subject, many young Chicagoans probably do not know how widespread this crime was or that it occurred outside of the South in places such as Downstate Cairo.
``No part of the nation was immune,'' as the exhibit recalls with a quotation from W.E.B. Du Bois. ``We must remember because if the world forgets evil, evil is reborn.''
The 53 images of lynchings that took place between 1870 and 1961 constitute a shocking testament to America's shame. The lynching exhibition runs through Dec. 4. Don't miss it.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, this editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times urges people to attend the exhibit and notes that ``many young Chicagoans probably do not know how widespread this crime was or that it occurred outside of the South in places such as downstate Cairo,'' IL. That is an important point. Lynching was not just a southern shame, it was an American shame. While most lynchings occurred in the South, they also happened in the North.
I commend Senators MARY LANDRIEU and GEORGE ALLEN for authoring this resolution and working so hard to have the Senate take it up and right this historical wrong. It is my hope the Senate will match the words of this resolution with action. It is not enough to apologize for the failure of our predecessors to protect their fellow citizens from violent prejudice. We have a responsibility to protect those who are targets of today's hate crimes as well. Senator TED KENNEDY, a Democrat, and Senator GORDON SMITH, a Republican, have been trying for years to persuade Congress to pass a new, stronger Federal hate crimes bill. Year after year, they have met with resistance.
Listen to the arguments of those who oppose a stronger hate crimes bill today, and you hear the same arguments that were made against a Federal antilynching bill decades ago. The names have changed, the arguments and the excuses are the same.
They say we in Congress cannot pass a strong hate crimes bill because it will infringe on States rights or because the Constitution does not give Congress explicit authority to pass such a law.
Listen to what a Member of the House of Representatives, James Woods of Virginia, said in 1922:
This bill, commonly known as the ``anti-lynching bill'' would be described more accurately if designated--from the standpoint of its effects rather than from its purpose--as a ``bill to override the Constitution of the United States, to foment race hatred, and to revive sectional animosity.'' If it were possible to put an end to lynching by a lawful act of Congress, none would support such legislation more earnestly than we of the South.
The Constitution does not say anything explicitly about the Civil Rights Act, which the Senate passed 41 years ago, or the Voting Rights Act, which turns 40 today. There always will be political voices that will find excuses to delay acting on the moral challenges of our time.
Finding the moral courage to deal with those challenges in our own time is the real test of leadership. What is it we are doing or failing to do today that would lead the Senate 50 years from now to apologize? That is the question.
I hope Congress will pass the Kennedy-Smith hate crimes bill as tangible proof to the victims of lynching that we will never again withhold our protection when Americans are persecuted and killed simply for being who they are.
When Mamie Till put her son on that train for Mississippi, he was wearing a watch he had been given by his father before his father died. The hands on that watch stopped when Emmitt Till was tortured and murdered.
Much has changed in the 50 years since Emmitt Till died, but some small part of America's soul has always remained frozen in that time because of our failure to formally acknowledge that what happened was wrong. By apologizing to the victims of lynching--and by having the courage to protect the victims of hate crimes today--we can reclaim that piece of our soul and move forward in time as one Nation indivisible.
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