Pubdate: Tue, 21 Jun 2005
Source: Quad-City Times ( IA )
Copyright: 2005 Quad-City Times
Contact:  http://www.qctimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/857
Author: Leonard Pitts
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues)

APOLOGY ACCEPTED, NOW DO SOMETHING

Ordinarily, I am not conflicted about apologies.  I'm for them.

But the feelings are more complex with last week's Senate apology for 
decades of inaction while an estimated 4,700 Americans, most of them 
black, were lynched.

As they died, skinned alive, burned alive, dancing at the end of 
ropes, as white people gathered to watch mob murder with the same 
festivity you would a county fair, as souvenir postcards of mutilated 
corpses were traded and hearts, bones and testicles harvested for 
mementoes, as local sheriffs and state legislatures looked the other 
way, as newspapers ran headlines like, "A Good Time Is Had By All As 
Negro Is Put To Death," as madness compounded madness, seven 
presidents asked Congress to enact a statute to make lynching a federal crime.

The Senate always said no.  Southern senators argued that such a law 
would infringe upon "state's rights," and loose bestial black men to 
put bestial black hands on virginal white women.  Asked for moral 
leadership, the Senate repeatedly failed to provide.

Eighty senators signed on as co-sponsors of last week's resolution of 
remorse for that failure, which was championed by Republican George 
Allen of Virginia and Democrat Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.  The 
Washington Post reports that the holdouts included - and I'm sure 
you're shocked to hear this - Mississippi Republicans Trent Lott and 
Thad Cochran.

I'd love to have heard them explain themselves to 91-year-old James 
Cameron, the only known survivor of a lynching.  I once interviewed 
him about that night, 75 years ago in Marion, Ind., when two friends 
invited him to join them in a stick-up.  He told me how he lost his 
nerve and ran.  How he was three blocks away, still running, when he 
heard the gunshots that killed Claude Deeter, a white man.

He told me how "lawmen" stomped him 'til he signed a confession.  How 
rocks slammed against the jailhouse walls and sledgehammers pounded 
the door.  How a white mob beat his friends to death and then came 
for him.  How the black men in the cell with him fell to their knees, 
hugging white men's legs, kissing white men's hands, begging for 
mercy.  How one of them finally pointed him out.

The rope was around his neck when a voice from the crowd - God, he 
says - proclaimed him innocent and the mob let him go.

Such was the criminal injustice system in 1930.  Seventy-five years 
later, though seldom that blatantly extra-legal, it seems to seek 
much the same end.

What other conclusion can you draw from the study that says that, 
while black people account for 13 percent of regular drug users, they 
represent 35 percent of drug-possession arrests and 55 percent of 
convictions? What other deduction can you make after a report that 
says a black drug defendant is 48 times more likely to be imprisoned 
than a white one with the same record? What else can you think when 
you see statistics that one is four times more likely to be executed 
for killing a white person than a black one?

And what else are you to believe when people, with an oblivious faith 
in their own fair-mindedness, tell you the fault lies not in systemic 
racism but in the inherent criminality of black people?

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not upset an apology was issued.

But, the moral cowardice of holdout senators aside, how much 
political courage is required in 2005 to say that it is wrong to 
stand by as mobs murder people? What does it tell you that we must 
get almost 50 years beyond lynching before we can muster the 
fortitude to call the sin a sin?

What happened last week was a historic gesture, an appropriate 
gesture, but in the end, only a gesture.  For it to be more requires 
not remorse about yesterday's injustices, but resolve about today's.

Courage isn't courage unless there's something at stake. 
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MAP posted-by: Beth