Senate notes its inaction on lynchings

In 1955, ''good men did nothing," said Simeon Wright, Till's cousin and one of the many descendants of lynching victims on hand for the Senate vote. Wright, who was there the night Till was abducted, said that if there had been a federal antilynching law, ''there was no way men would have come into my house and taken him out and killed him."

Among the witnesses to the Senate apology was a 91-year-old man thought to be the only living survivor of a lynching attempt.

''I came here to bear witness on behalf of my cousin Jimmy," said Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former defense secretary William Cohen and a member of the group that has pushed for the apology.

Her third cousin, 17-year-old Jimmy Gillenwaters, was killed by a lynch mob near Bowling Green, Ky., in 1912. He was one of 4,743 people killed by mob violence between 1882 and 1968, according to Tuskegee University records. Of those, nearly three-fourths, 3,446, were blacks. Lynchings reached a peak of 230 in 1892, but they were prevalent well into the 1930s. Twenty lynchings were reported in 1935.

During that time, nearly 200 antilynching bills were introduced in Congress, and three passed the House. Seven presidents between 1890 and 1952 petitioned Congress to pass a federal law.

But the Senate, with Southern conservatives wielding their filibuster powers, refused to act. With the enactment of civil rights laws in the 1960s and changes in national attitudes, the issue faded.

Lynching is variously defined as a violent act, usually racial in nature, that denies a person due process of law and is carried out with the complicity of the local society.

The sponsors of the resolution, Landrieu and George Allen, Republican of Virginia, said they were motivated in part by a recent book, ''Without Sanctuary, Lynching Photography in America," in which author James Allen collected lynch pictures, mostly taken by those participating in the killings.

''More than a half-century ago, mere feet from where we sit . . .the Senate failed you and your ancestors and our nation," Landrieu told descendants at a lunch in the Capitol.