[
Crossposted at The Next Hurrah]
On Monday, about a hundred years too late, the Senate finally passed a resolution condemning lynching. Introduced by Louisiana Democrat Mary Landrieu with principal support from Virginia Republican George Allen, the resolution apologies to the victims of lynchings for the Senate's failure to enact anti-lynching laws. Hardly a radical document, the resolution expresses beliefs one would expect any American not active in the Klan would respect and support. But apparently not every United States Senator respects and supports the sensible and decent belief that our government should apologize for not enacting anti-lynching laws. Some contend that opposition to Landrieu's resolution is an act of racial insensitivity. It is surely that, as lynching in the 20th century was perpetrated almost exclusively by whites against blacks, primarily in the Jim Crow South. But lynching was much more than racist terror, it was a flouting of the rule of law. It was an international embarrassment for the United States. And in this era of Abu Ghraib and Gitmo and Alberto Gonzales torture memos, failure to support Mary Landrieu's resolution apologizing for the Senate's failure to enact anti-lynching laws should be seen as not just racially insensitive, but a failure to stand up and assert the primacy of law in America.
The history of lynching goes back much further than the post-reconstruction Jim Crow South. The term "lynch" was named after Captain William Lynch, who during the American Revolution constituted his own supra-judicial tribunal and summarily executed accused royalists. While lynchings have come to be associated only with racially-motivated killings of African-Americans, especially over accusations of rape, lynchings were really a form of vigilante violence and political terrorism:
Although rape is often cited as a rationale, statistics now show that only about one-fourth of lynchings from 1880 to 1930 were prompted by an accusation of rape. In fact, most victims of lynching were political activists, labor organizers or black men and women who violated white expectations of black deference, and were deemed "uppity" or "insolent." Though most victims were black men, women were by no means exempt.
While a majority of lynching victims were black, blacks weren't the overwhelming majority. Yes, the majority of lynchings occurred in the states of the Confederacy, and in those states 86% of lynching victims from 1882 to 1968 were black. But according to figures on the known instances of lynchings--it's likely that a lot more lynchings occurred than just those that were confirmed--a quarter of all lynchings in that time period occurred outside the South, and in those states a large majority--65%--of the victims of lynchings were not black. Furthermore, if you remove Kentucky, Missouri and Oklahoma from the list of non-Confederate states, less than a quarter of the remaining 773 known victims of lynchings were black, with most of the rest being of European descent, although there were also many Mexicans, Chinese and Native Americans who were lynched.
Lots of lynchings were extra-judicial murders of people who themselves had committed murder or rape. But many lynchings were acts of terror to enforce a political, economic or social order. Blacks were lynched for such trivial reasons as public drunkenness or harvesting cotton too early in the season. Plenty of men were lynched for stealing horses or cattle. In Wyoming people were lynched on trumped up charges when the real dispute was a range war. In Montana in 1864 a group called the Montana Vigilantes hanged 21 people in two months; some historians believe that what was touted as "justice" was really organized crime. And lynchings were widespread. In 1892, 240 people were lynched in 25 states and the Arizona territory. And from 1882 to 1968 lynchings occurred in every state except six: the new states of Hawaii and Alaska, and the New England states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. Maine and Vermont each had only one lynching, each of a white man, so New England can rightly claim innocence to charges of lynchings of Blacks. But the rest of the country, save Alaska and Hawaii, shares the guilt some think only taints the states of the Confederacy.
RonK and Kagro X have written excellent posts raising procedural and contextual questions concerning the blogosphere's outrage that not every Senator immediately signed on to the Landrieu resolution. I encourage everyone to read their posts and the accompanying discussions. But at this point, two days after the resolution was adopted without a roll call vote, one has to wonder why in the hell somebody would still refuse to sign on to this particular resolution. It's certainly possible, as some have suggested, that Allen's early co-sponsorship of the resolution inserted presidential politics into the mix, with possible 2008 Republican rival Frist (and possibly others) reluctant to give Allen a platform from which he could talk about how he loves Black folk, and thinks it's just awful what was done to them in the past. It's also possible that some of the holdouts just don't like things that they believe give special attention to "victimized" groups, which would mean they're thinking of lynching as something that occurred only in the context of Jim Crow racism in the South. But as shown, lynching wasn't limited to the South or to Blacks, but was something widespread and that should be seen as a form of anarchy, a flouting of civil control and the rule of law. And looking at the list of Republicans who still refuse to cosponsor Landreiu's resolution, I'm struck by the irony of supporters of our 21st century extra-judicial practices refusing to acknowledge the harm caused to our country by the most common form of extra-judicial practice in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
This week we've seen lots of discord among Republicans on whether Gitmo should be shut down because it's become a public relations problem. If the Senators holding out against the Landreiu resolution thought about lynching in the broader context, maybe they would see some lessons for today.
By the turn of the century, the Old West had instituted official legal entities throughout the states and most of the vigilante groups had disappeared. From there on out,
almost all of the lynchings that occurred in the 20th century were either racially or politically motivated. The international response, condemning the U.S. for lynching foreign citizens residing in the U.S. resulted in the State Department having to pay out hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to foreign governments. Between 1887 and 1903 a total of $480,000 was paid to the governments of China, Italy, Great Britain and Mexico alone. During this time, Americans traveling abroad routinely encountered critical commentaries in foreign newspapers and magazines condemning the common practice of lynching in the United States. How could America, these foreign critics asked, champion human rights abroad when it failed to prevent and punish the most brutal human rights violations at home?
In 1897 the US was pressuring the Turkish Ottoman Empire to cease it's violence against the Armenians, just as today the U.S. implores other countries to respect human rights and freedom of worship at the same time as we torture prisoners in Abu Ghraib, defile the holy book of Islam in Gitmo, and excuse massacres committed by unsavory allies like the regime in Uzbekistan. Change the details from lynching to torture and "renditions," and this New York Evening Post editorial from 1897 seems uncannily current:
Mustapha Bey, the Turkish Minister at Washington, will have another chance to score off American sympathizers with the victims of the Sultan. He referred the other day to the Urbana [Ohio] lynching, when asked about Turkish outrages, and now an even more brutal and shocking affair occurred in Maryland. A negro actually under sentence of death is taken from the officers of the law and kicked and strangled to death in broad daylight by an infuriated mob, not one man of whom even deigned to disguise himself. The judge who had just sentenced the criminal to death rushes out to implore the mob to let the law take its course, but he is lucky to get off himself without lynching. Things are getting worse in the North than in the South; in Virginia they at least let convicted negroes be hanged by process of law; in Maryland the raging mob must slake its thirst for blood without a moment's delay. These occurrences certainly give a queer look to our horror at Armenian massacres. If we content ourselves with protesting against our own lynchings, and disowning them, we are no better than the Sultan, he always protests against his own murderous exploits. If some of the Princess Anne [Maryland] mob can not be brought to justice, why should a sentence of any court, or any law on the statute-book, be any longer respected or heeded in Maryland?
Just as the rule of law was the underlying issue being neglected during the heyday of lynchings in the United States, it's the rule of law being neglected in the era of John Cornyn--who hasn't cosponsored the Landrieu resolution--essentially blaming "judicial activism" for violence against judges, and Alberto Gonzales writing a memo urging the President to flout the principles underlying the Declaration of Independence and the belief that we are a nation of laws, and systematic torture at Abu Ghraib blamed on "a few bad apples." Landrieu's resolution made it clear that lynchings are a blot on our history not just as violence against the victims, but as a denial of their basic constitutional rights. Lynchings occurred outside the framework of a society within a nation of laws. Kudos to Landrieu for making it clear that her resolution was more than a necessary and overdue apology to African-Americans. But some Senators who didn't cosponsor the resolution are among those least likely to ever give what they would consider a sop to African-American voters, and some others who cosponsored the resolution probably never considered lynchings as not just violence but a collapse of the rule of law. Therefore, its likely that we just missed an opportunity to not just atone for historical sins, but to also reflect on how our past failures should inspire us to look at our conduct today, and to be extra vigilant in assuring that the United States of America becomes a better example for the rest of the world by stamping out lawlessness in our own midst.