Anti-lynching laws

The (Harrisburg, Pa.) Patriot-News

It is an ugly stain on this country, no less than the U.S. Senate, that nearly 5,000 people, three-quarters of them African-Americans, were lynched between 1882 and 1968 and the Senate did nothing except filibuster legislation to address this gross injustice.

A lynching is an execution carried out by a mob without legal sanction. Most lynchings occurred in the segregated South, where racial hatred and the treatment of blacks as inferiors went hand and glove. There were reported lynchings in all but four states, with Mississippi topping the list with 581.

There were at least three lynchings in Pennsylvania, perhaps the best known of which occurred in Coatesville in 1911 when Zack Walker, a black man, was dragged from a hospital still chained to his bed and burned to death for killing a white steel mill cop. There were reported to be thousands of witnesses, but no one was ever convicted of the crime.

And that is one of the most disturbing aspects of lynchings. There was nothing secret about them. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people stood by and watched them as a community spectacle that often included torturing the victim before hanging or burning him to death. The press reported the scenes in great detail, both locally and in larger big-city newspapers. And often the alleged crime was no more than a dispute with a white man.

The belated apology of the Senate, which failed to follow through on the three proposed federal anti-lynching laws that the House of Representatives had passed, will not bring back to life any of the victims of lynching. But it represents a small step for America in confronting its not-always-hallowed past.

Too often of late we've come across as a nation that thinks it is superior to the rest of the world in its system of laws and justice. But while we have much to be proud of in this country, we also managed to turn a blind eye to acts of barbarism inflicted with stunning regularity upon those who were different from the majority through a long period of our history.

Racism is by no means a thing of the past in this country. But at least we've reached the point where one of the world's great deliberative bodies recognizes racism as the evil it truly is and is willing to acknowledge its complicity in perpetuating one of its most brutal manifestations.