Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Senate Apologizes for Failure to Pass Anti-Lynching Law

Today the Senate formally apologized for its failure to pass an anti-lynching law in the first part of the twentieth century, despite nearly 200 such bills being introduced, and seven presidents calling for the passage of the bills.

4,743 lynchings were recorded in the South in the period between 1882 and 1963.

2 comments:

Matt said...

The thing that is annoying abou this is that most of the people who did not pass thae anti-lynching legislation are not in the Senate now. (Although there is one Democrat senator who was a Grand Master of the KKK)

These kinds of apologies are meaningless.

Paul4peace said...

Dear Matt,

I think that even largely symbolic actions such as this serve an important purpose. They protect us aganst the collective amnesia that tends to set in after the fact, reminding us that desegregation and the struggle for civil rights took place, not long long ago in a galaxy far away, but fairly recently. We do not learn from that which we hasten to forget.

S.