A resolution apologizing to the victims of lynching and the descendants of those victims for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the clerk proceed with the reading of the resolution.

Mr. President, tonight this body will take an important and extraordinary step. The Senate will, belatedly but most sincerely, issue a formal apology to the victims of lynching and their families, some of whom are with us tonight in this Chamber, for its failure to pass antilynching legislation.

Without question, there have been other grave injustices committed in the noble exercise of establishing this great democracy. Some have already been acknowledged and addressed by this and previous Congresses, and our work continues. However, there may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility. In refusing to take up legislation passed by the House of Representatives on three separate occasions and requested by seven Presidents from William Henry Harrison to Harry Truman, the Senate engaged in a different kind of culpability.

Beginning in 1881, this tragic phenomenon of domestic terrorism was documented in large measure through the groundbreaking and heroic efforts of Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the independent newspapers and publications. From that year until 1964, 4,742 American citizens were lynched. These are the recorded numbers. Historians estimate the true number to be much higher.

An apology alone can never suffice to heal the harm that was done, and for many victims justice is out of reach. Yet I believe, and this resolution lays forth the principle, that a sincere and heartfelt apology is a necessary first step toward real healing.

It is important that the people of our country understand the true nature of this unprecedented rampage of terror. Many Americans have images from popular books and movies, like ``To Kill a Mockingbird,'' that cloud their understanding of lynching. A group of angry White men take an accused and presumed guilty Black man deep into the woods and hang him. Those are the images, although accurate and tragic, but they delude us from the true nature of lynching in this dark period of American history.

The thought of a small, angry mob murdering Black prisoners in the dead of night ignores the reality of lynching in most respects. We are fortunate and grateful that a passionate and resolute independent scholar named James Allen saw something catalytic in the photographic evidence of lynching, and he began to collect these gruesome and horrific photographs. His work, ``Without Sanctuary,'' showed the real faces of lynching, and the images he unveiled began to change the way people viewed these tragic events and called to several of us in the Senate to issue this apology tonight. It is because of his work, this book, that the Committee for a Formal Apology and the families of the lynching victims--and some victims themselves who are here--are here today and that this important historic resolution is before the Senate.

I would like to show some of these photographs now. This is one of the hundreds--thousands of photographs of men, women, and children who were lynched in this Nation, lynching that occurred--a citizen of our Nation, lynched. As your eyes look at this picture, they are immediately drawn to the victim. These hangings were sometimes--in most instances--very brutal events. Sometimes the hanging itself came after hours of torture and just excruciating fear and humiliation.

After this book was published and these pictures came into more full view of the American public, what happens is your eyes leave the figure of the victim and move to the audience. This is part of the story that, in my mind, has not been completely told, and it needs to be told tonight and every day into the future.

As you can see, there are children gathered here. These are children looking up at this man hanging from a tree. History will record that some of these children were let out of Sunday schools to attend the lynchings. History will record that some businesses closed down so that the whole town could attend these lynchings. History will record that these lynchings did not occur mostly at night or in the back woods or across the levees--lynchings were a community event. In many instances, it was a form of public entertainment. It was mass violence, an open act of terrorism directed primarily against African Americans and others who sympathized with their cause.

If we are truly to understand the magnitude of this tragedy, we must study the stories behind this grim parade of death.

In March of 1892, three personal friends of Ida B. Wells opened the ``People's Grocery Company,'' a store located across the street from a White-owned grocery store that had previously been the only grocer in the area. Angered by the loss of business, a mob gathered to run the new grocers out of town. Forewarned about the attack on their store, the three owners armed themselves for protection, and in the riot that ensued, one of the businessmen injured a White man. All three were arrested and jailed. Days later, the mob kidnapped the men from jail and lynched them. This was the case that led Ida B. Wells to begin to speak out against this injustice.

Her great grandson is with us today. He has told this story through the halls of Congress to give testimony to her life and to her courage and to her historic efforts. Without the work of this extraordinarily brave journalist, this story never really could have been told in the way it is being told now, today, and talked about here on the Senate floor. To her, we owe a great deal of gratitude. She knew these men personally. She knew they were businessmen. They were not criminals. She knew they were successful salespeople, not common thugs. And she wrote and she spoke and she tried to gather pictures to tell a story to a nation that simply refused to believe.

Forty-two years and thousands of lynchings later is the case of Claude Neal of Marianna, FL. After 10 hours of torture, Claude Neal ``confessed'' to the murder of a girl with whom he was allegedly having an affair. For his safety, he was transferred to an Alabama prison. A mob took him from there. They cut off his body parts. They sliced his side and stomach. People would randomly cut off a finger here, a toe there. From time to time, they would tie a noose around him, throw the rope over a tree limb. The mob would keep him there in that position until he almost died then lower him again to begin the torment all over.

After several hours, and I guess the crowd exhausted themselves, they just decided to kill him. His body was then dragged by car back to Marianna, and 7,000 people from 11 States were there to see his body in the courthouse of the town square. Pictures were taken and sold for 50 cents a piece.

One might ask, how do we know all the grizzly details of Claude Neal's death? It is very simple. The newspapers in Florida had given advance notice. They recorded it one horrible moment after another. One of the members of the lynch mob proudly relayed all the details that reporters had missed in person. Yet, even with the public notice, 7,000 people in attendance, and people bragging about the activity, Federal authorities were impotent to stop this murder. State authorities seemed to condone it, and the Senate of the United States refused to act.

Time went on. In 1955, just 9 years before Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, the world witnessed the brutal lynching of Emmett Till. Fourteen

years old, Emmett Till was excited about his trip from his home on Chicago's southside to the Mississippi Delta. Like many children during the summer, he was looking forward to visiting his relatives. Prior to his departure, his mother, Maimie Till Bradley, a teacher, had done her very best to advise him about how to behave while in Mississippi. With his mother's warning and wearing the ring that had belonged to his deceased father, on August 20, 1955, Till set off with his cousin, Curtis Jones, on a train to Mississippi.

Once there, he and some friends went to buy some candy at the general store. According to his accusers, this young 14-year-old whistled at a store clerk as he left. She happened to be a white woman.

Armed with pistols, the mob took Emmett from his uncle's home. His uncle is with us tonight. They took him in the middle of the night. Three days later his little body was discovered in the Tallahatchie River, weighed down by a 75-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His face was so mutilated when Wright identified the body he could only do so based on the ring that he had been wearing.

Coincidentally, through no asking of our own, but I guess it is appropriate, the trial of his accused murderer, Edgar Ray Killen, begins today in Mississippi.

While the details that led to the lynching are not always clear from just these few that I have described, there is little doubt what took place at the lynchings themselves. In most instances, prelynching newspaper notices, school closings to allow children to view the spectacle, special order trains to carry people to the event, are all part of a gruesome but true part of America's history.

Jazz legend Billy Holiday provided real texture in her story and song ``Strange Fruit.'' She defied her own record label and produced and published the song on her own, was threatened with her life because she continued to sing it. But like so many things, words can't always describe what is happening, even though speeches were given, words were written, newspapers were published.

The words to the song are as follows:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh,

And the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,

Here is a strange and a bitter crop.

Something in the way she sang this song, something in the pictures that described the event, must have touched the heart of Americans because they began to mobilize, and men and women, White and Black, people from different backgrounds, came to stand up and begin to speak. They spoke with loud voices and with moving speeches and with great marches.

But the Senate of the United States, one of the most noble experiments in democracy, continued to pretend, to act like this was not happening in America and continued to fail to act.

It would be a mistake to look at this ugly chapter in our democracy's development with pity and hopelessness, however. The truth is, today's apology should be seen as a tribute to the endurance and the triumph of African-American families.

There is a particular family here, the Crawford family. I think there are over 150 of them. Earlier today I talked with some of the leaders of the family. I said: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. They nodded because that is exactly what happened to this family. The town tried to kill this family, to run them out, and, in fact, ran them out of the town, but this family just grew stronger, and with their love and lack of bitterness, but with a determination to find justice some way, they are here today. In fact, it was the progress of African Americans that spurred this terrible reaction to them in the first place.

As I stated earlier, the early lynchings were not of criminals. The early lynchings were of successful farmers, of successful businessmen, leaders in their communities because these lynchings were an act of terrorism to make American citizens feel they had no voice and no place.

W.E.B. Dubois summarized the motivation behind these slayings perfectly when he said:

. . . [T]he South feared more than Negro dishonesty,

ignorance and incompetency, Negro honesty, knowledge, and

efficiency.

With slavery abolished by the Civil War, a group of Americans had to mentally justify as inferior and subhuman those who suddenly were equals and competitors. Having lost the war throughout the South, watching the progress of former slaves was simply too much in that region and in other regions throughout the country, as well.

As a senior Senator from the State of Louisiana, I feel compelled to spend just a few moments, before I acknowledge my friend and cosponsor in the Senate, Senator George Allen, who has brought this resolution to the attention of our Senate colleagues.

Louisiana has a distinct history from much of the United States due to its long colonial ties with both France and Spain. One consequence of this history is that Louisiana had more free people of color than any other Southern State. Nearly 20,000 Louisianians who were largely concentrated in New Orleans formed a large and very prosperous African- American community in the 1860s. They enjoyed more rights than most free men of color. A large percentage spoke only French and educated their children in Europe. The community, the records show, owned more than $2 million worth of property, which was quite a large sum in those days, and dominated skilled labor areas such as masonry, carpentry, cigar making, and shoemaking.

That is why Louisiana's prominent role in lynchings is so bitter. It mars a long history of tolerance and integration that to this day distinguishes Louisiana from other places in the South.

Still the difficult fact remains that only three States have had a higher incidence than Louisiana of these occurrences. The NAACP, which was founded over the issue of lynchings, recorded 391 such murders in my State.

I ask unanimous consent that a list of all the Louisiana victims compiled by Professor Michael Pfeifer, author of ``Rough Justice, Lynching and American Society,'' be printed in the Record.

It is also true that members of the Senate delegation from Louisiana participated in the actions that led us to not act.

However, I am very proud to stand here with my colleague from Virginia and to note that the other Senator from Louisiana, a Republican, stands with me. We are united in our support of this resolution to offer the sincere apology to try to bring to light the facts about lynching, to encourage people to seek the truth.

I said earlier today people are entitled to their own opinions. But they are not entitled to their own facts. And the facts about this terrible domestic terrorism and rash of terrorism stand today and will not be pushed aside. It is with humility but with pride that I support and put forth before the Senate today, with the Senator from Virginia, this resolution.

The junior Senator from Louisiana is an original cosponsor of this resolution, as are a number of sons of the South. Furthermore, in Louisiana's legislature in Baton Rouge, a very similar resolution passed today. Thus, the people of Louisiana can truly say we are trying to open a dialogue, and bring closure to a bitter history.

This is a particularly important step for the South. For while lynchings occurred in 46 of the 50 States, and people of all races were affected, it would be a mischaracterization to suggest that this was not a weapon of terror most often employed in the South, and most often against African Americans. That is why I am so glad to be joined in this endeavor by the junior Senator from Virginia, Mr. Allen. He has been instrumental in getting us to this point of consideration, and I truly appreciate his hard work and dedication to our joint effort.

It is also important to acknowledge the bravery of those who took personal risks long before this day in opposition to lynching. First and foremost, we must acknowledge the pioneering journalism of Ida B. Wells. Though personally threatened with death, Ms. Wells continued to document these outrages before justice, so that future generations might know the history of this era. It should be noted that it was her example that led other women, such as Jane Adams, to join in her fight against lynching. In fact, women, generally, are viewed as having played a major role in the antilynching campaign.

There was tremendous political courage shown in Georgia. Georgia was the first State to adopt antilynching legislation in 1893. Yet, the State continued to experience a disproportionate share of lynching attacks. However, starting with Governor Northen in 1890, several of Georgia's Governors fought lynch violence in their State resolutely. In many cases it came at personal cost. Gov. William Atkinson, having left the Governor's mansion, personally challenged a lynch mob of 2,000 people in his home town. It is a record of political leadership upon which Georgia can now proudly reflect.

Another great voice in the antilynching crusade was Congressman George White of Tarboro, NC. He was the last former slave to serve in Congress--ending his congressional career in 1901. He introduced an anti-lynching bill to stem the rising tide of violence, with 107 attacks having occurred in 1899. While his bill was defeated in the House of Representatives, he initiated one of its first political considerations.

Finally, we cannot ignore the Senate's own passionate voices to end the practice of lynching. Senator Champ Clark of Missouri famously posted photos of a recent Mississippi lynching in the Democratic cloakroom with the caption: There have been no arrests, no indictments, and no convictions of any one of the lynchers. This is not a rape case. Regrettably, those photos and his convictions could not bring these terrible events to a close. We also salute the efforts of Senators Robert Wagner of New York and Edward Costigan of Colorado. The Wagner- Costigan bill was yet another noble effort to inject Federal resources into combating lynching. While it was again filibustered, it was another noble effort that demonstrated that people of good will remained the majority.

Because of the courage of these and other individuals, by the 1930s public opinion had turned against lynching. In 1938, a national survey showed that 70 percent of Americans supported the enactment of an antilynching statute. Even in the South, at least 65 percent of these surveyed favored its passage. In short, even if southern Senators had the political latitude to endorse Federal antilynching legislation, most seemed to be too mired in personal prejudice to accept that fact. Where these southern Senators were concerned, justice was mostly deaf, but never color blind.

In closing, I would like to acknowledge several members of my staff: Jason Matthews, Kathleen Strottman, Nash Molphus, Sally Richardson, and many others, who have helped, along with others, put this resolution before the Senate today.

I want to end with one of the most moving comments that I read in the book ``Without Sanctuary,'' as I have read excerpts from publications and magazines and newspapers about this situation, and have been reading them now for months on this issue. It is taken from McClure's Magazine, in 1905, by Ray Stannard Baker, who wrote about one of the lynchings--I think it was of a Mr. Curtis. I will submit that for the Record. He says:

So the mob came finally, and cracked the door of the jail

with a railroad rail. The jail is said to be the strongest in

Ohio, and having seen it, I can well believe the report is

true. But steel bars have never yet kept out a mob; it takes

something much stronger: human courage backed up by the

consciousness of being right.

Mr. President, the Senate was wrong not to act. It was wrong to not stand in the way of the mob. We lacked courage then. We perhaps do not have all the courage we need today to do everything we should do, but I know we can apologize today. We can be sincere in our apology to the families, to their loved ones, and perhaps now we can set some of these victims and their families free and, most of all, set our country free to be better than it is today. However great it is, we can most certainly improve.

I yield the floor for my colleague, Senator Allen, from Virginia.

Mr. President, I will be happy to yield to the Senator from Massachusetts in just a moment. He has been very patient. As a cosponsor of the resolution that just passed, it is a privilege and it is appropriate for Senator Kerry to be one of the first Senators to speak upon its passage.

I wish to just mention very briefly, because I am not sure he is going to be able to stay with us much longer, Mr. James Cameron has been with us all day. Mr. Cameron is 91 years old. He lives in Marion, IN. In 1930, when he was 16 years old, a mob dragged him from a cell at Grant County Jail and put a rope around his neck. He was accused of a murder and a rape. He was nowhere around when it occurred. His associates, Abe Smith and Thomas Schipp, were both lynched that night. A man in the crowd spared him by proclaiming that he, in fact, was innocent and should be let go. He then went on to live an extraordinary life without bitterness, with a lot of love. He has been married for 67 years, has 4 children and multiple grandchildren. Senator Evan Bayh, who serves in this body--when he was Governor of Indiana, he pardoned Mr. Cameron. But he

is really the one who has forgiven us for what was done against him.

I yield the floor to Senator Kerry.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. President, I am here tonight on behalf of my colleague from Virginia, Senator Allen, and all of our colleagues who participated in the debate to close out this evening on this very important and historic resolution, S. Res. 39, which has apologized formally, officially, and with great sincerity to the thousands of victims of

lynching and to their descendants. It was, as was stated most eloquently and passionately on this floor, a very dark chapter, indeed, in American history, but a real mark against this Senate that, despite the repeated pleas of the victims and their families, thousands of Americans, the House of Representatives, and seven Presidents, of both parties, the Senate failed to act.

Tonight the Senate has admitted its mistake and has taken a very positive step in admitting failure so that we can have a brighter future. I know that many of these victims and their families-- ``survivors'' is really a better word--have triumphed against this evil. Many were African Americans, but they were people of all different races and religious backgrounds. Many of them were here tonight and have been with us all day today.

I know their names are part of the record, but again they were James Cameron, 91 years old, a victim of lynching who miraculously survived to tell his story; Doria Johnson, the great-granddaughter of Anthony Crawford--Grandpa Crawford, as he has been called--from Abbeville, SC-- what a story that family has to tell. Dan Distel, the great-grandson of Ida Wells. What a brave and historic journalist she was. In the face of literally constant threats to her life, she continued to write. What a role model for journalists everywhere of the courage of what it really takes to tell a story. And she did it.

We had many other family members and history professors with us today. There was a tremendous effort that enabled us to get to the floor tonight. As I wrap up, I want to again thank the staff. I thank my staff, including Jason Matthews, my deputy chief of staff; Kathleen Strottman, legislative director; Nash Molpus, who is with me on the floor. Our staff has been very helpful. Senator Allen's staff has also been remarkable and so many have contributed to this effort.

I had many quotes to choose from, Mr. President, to end tonight. Really, there were hundreds of them that would be appropriate. But one was especially appropriate, for the close of this debate because, while it ends one chapter, it begins many new chapters in the history of our Nation. The woman I will quote from is one I have admired my whole life. I have read much about her and have been taught a lot about her. I will read this quote from this particular woman because it took guts to say what she did, at a time when people in America didn't want to hear it. This came at a time when people didn't want to hear what women had to say, generally, about any subject, let alone the subject of injustice and intolerance not only in our Nation but the world.

The woman I will quote is Eleanor Roosevelt, who actually led a group of descendants into this Chamber in 1938 to urge the Senate, hopefully by their presence, to act--men and women who came with their own being, their own bodies to try to tell the Senate what you are reading about isn't true; these are innocent people. Eleanor Roosevelt escorted them to this Chamber and, of course, through all of their mighty efforts, actions were not taken, but not through any fault of hers. What I want to quote is what she wrote about universal human rights. I read this as a young legislator. Of course, we read lots of things, and some things stick and some don't. This particular quote is seared into my heart. I try to remember it every chance I get. I read it often, and I would like to read it tonight because it is very relevant to the debate that we have had. She wrote:

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small

places, close to home--so close and so small they cannot be

seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the

individual person, the neighborhood he lives in, the school

or college he attends, the factory, farm, or office where he

works. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child

seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without

discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they

have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen

action to uphold them close at home, we shall look for them

in vain in the larger world.

We have heard stories today--hundreds of stories about these small places close to home--trees in a public square, river banks, levees, streets, alleys, open fields, behind school buildings, and in front of stores. This is where people want to experience dignity and justice. Some of these towns are so little they may still not be on any map of the United States. Maybe in some of these towns--because of what happened in the past--there are very few people who live there. And some of these places are quite large, where you can find them on the map. I think it is instructive for the Senate, as we make this sincere apology tonight, that we really take a breath and be very introspective to think about where these small places are in America, where these places of any size are in America, and recommit ourselves to be honest about our failings and our shortcomings, to be honest about the fact that we are not always as courageous as we should be.

But when we come to a point where we know we made the wrong decision, we didn't act in the best interests of our country or the American citizens who look to us for their protection and their support, we should at least be able to sincerely say we are sorry. That is what we did tonight. I thank Eleanor Roosevelt. I am forever grateful for her great leadership for the country and for thousands of Americans, people of all races, who advocated for justice and freedom at great expense to their own life--which is not what most of us experience today, gratefully--with great expense to their reputation, their livelihood. She was really not understood or appreciated in the world in which she lived.

There were many children in the Senate today, these children and great, great, great-grandchildren. Some of the victims and some of the journalists who have written about this in the past were here. Let's make sure they know the truth and they know that tonight we apologize.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I rise today to speak in support of the resolution of apology that Senator Landrieu of Louisiana and I have submitted. I thank the Senator from Louisiana for her leadership on this matter. It has been a pleasure to work with her on this and other matters, but this is undoubtedly the most historic.

I got involved in this because I received a letter from Dick Gregory. I know Members of the Senate received thousands of letters and e-mails and phone calls. He asked me to join with Senator Landrieu last year on this. He was signing this letter on behalf of Dr. E. Faye Williams, Martin Luther King III, Dr. C. DeLores Tucker, and others. But he asked me. He said:

I respectfully ask you to serve as an original cosponsor of

the Landrieu resolution. . . . We realize life will go on and

your world will not be affected if you choose to do nothing.

That struck me as: Well, I am going to choose to do something. He asked me to sponsor this on the Republican side ``because it is the right thing to do.''

That says it all, really, when we see an affront to the basic principles that were enunciated in the spirit of this country in the Declaration of Independence. When we seceded from Britain, we talked about freedom, liberty, and justice, trying to constitute that here in this country, fighting for so many years to free ourselves from the monarch to construct a free and just society, with freedom of religion, freedom of expression, due process of law, equal protection, as well as the rule of law.

In so many of those key pillars of a free and just society, when one looks at what happened with the lynchings, the torchings, the whippings to death of people because of their race, because of their religion, because of their ethnicity, the cold-hearted hatred of it, and the countenance of it--and the fact that this wonderful Senate, with these historic desks where you can pull out drawers and see some of the great minds, the great orators of our history who had argued magnificently and inspiringly things on this Senate floor--you see there were times in our history when Senators ended up looking the other way. They did not take a stand. They turned their eyes, they turned their heads when something positive could have been done to disapprove, deplore, and obviously pass a law to make lynching a Federal crime.

This Chamber is part of our representative democracy. We are to represent the ``Will of the People.'' We are also to represent those foundational principles of our country. Unfortunately, that has not always occurred.

Daniel Webster, standing in the Old Senate Chamber, told his colleagues in 1834 that a ``representative of the people is a sentinel on the watchtower of liberty.'' Indeed, the Senate has been a great watchtower of liberty. Many individuals have been outstanding orators, brilliant men and women in the world's greatest deliberative body. Unfortunately, this August body has a stain on its history, and that stain is lynching. Americans died from hangings, from whippings, from a torch, from evil hearts outside of this Chamber.

Three-fourths of the victims of these injustices--and these have been documented and researched by the respected archives of the Tuskegee Institute--were perpetrated against African Americans. Mr. President, 4,749 Americans died by lynching, whipping, torturing, and mutilation, starting in 1882. Many times these lynchings were not lone acts by a few white men. Rather, they were angry gangs, as Senator Landrieu talked about. They were occasions, they were events, mobs who were whipped into frenzies by the skewed mentalities of what is right and what is wrong.

These cruel and unjust acts are so contrary to the rule of law, due process, and equal protection that we pride ourselves on in the United States. Again, three-quarters of the victims were African Americans. But this hatred also was perpetrated against those who are Asian, primarily Chinese; against American Indians; against Latinos; against Italians; and against people who are Jewish; and others who found themselves unprotected.

Mr. President, Senator Landrieu and I, as well as my colleagues who are joining us right now in the Chamber--Senator Kerry and Senator Pryor--are rising this evening to make history, to try to right history. We are standing to give our heartfelt and formal apology, not for what anybody here presently in the Senate had done, but what this body, this continuous body, failed to do in the past. And it is an apology to all the victims and descendants of those who were lynched, who were whipped to death, who were torched to death, who were mutilated to death.

Many of the victims' descendants are currently watching in our gallery. This is a somber, not happy time but also one of reflection. It is one of the failures of the Senate to take action when action was most needed. It was a time where we were trying to make sure all Americans had equal opportunity. However, that clearly was not the case.

Senator Landrieu showed those photographs. These were vile killings. They captivated front-page headlines. They drew crowds with morbid curiosity and left thousands and thousands, mostly African Americans, hanging from trees or bleeding to death from the lashing of whips. By not acting, this body failed to protect the liberty of which Daniel Webster spoke.

One of those who suffered this awful fate was an African American named Zachariah Walker, from Coatsville, VA. In 1911, Walker was dragged from a hospital bed where he was recovering from a gunshot wound. Accused of killing a white man--which he had claimed was in self-defense--Walker was burned alive at the stake without trial.

Such horrendous acts were not just a regional phenomenon of the South. States such as Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and even the Washington, DC area experienced this sort of mob violence and injustice. Lynching was not just a regional problem; it was a crime throughout our Nation, which occurred in 46 States of our country. It was because of the national scope of these atrocities that the Senate should act.

The Senate, of course, failed to pass any of the nearly 200 antilynching bills introduced in Congress during the first half of the 20th century. Three bills passed the House of Representatives, but they were filibustered on the Senate floor. In addition, seven Presidents had asked that such laws be passed.

One might ask: What impact would such a Federal law have had? Would that have saved all 4,749 people who were lynched, torched, mutilated, or whipped to death? Probably not in all cases because some had occurred before such bills were passed.

However, it would have sent a message, as it was read in newspapers across the land--whether in small towns, big cities, or in the country--that as a nation, we must stop such horrendous injustices being perpetrated on people, that we stand for the rule of law and equal protection and due process. By the Senate not acting, guess what message was sent. It sent the message that there are some people who may not think this is a good idea, that the Senate apparently condones it because they failed to act, notwithstanding the request of Presidents and the passage of such bills in the House of Representatives.

Why was Federal legislation needed? Because out of these 4,749 injustices of lynching, torching, and whipping, only 1 percent were prosecuted. In many cases, local authorities were complicit and involved in these cruel acts of injustice. Virginia was one of the States that actually passed an antilynching law which means that while there were 100 such lynchings, torchings, and burnings--and 100 is too many--compared to other States in the South, that was less. I have learned a lot since we introduced this bill. North Carolina's Governors, in the early 1900s, protested against such mob violence in their State and, therefore, they had less than in other States.

Another reason I got involved is to carry on the tradition of a man named Champ Clark, a Senator from Missouri whose son was actually one of my mentors when I first became involved in organized politics. He moved to the Charlottesville area when I was Governor, and I appointed him to the University of Virginia Board of Visitors. Sadly, he died a few years ago.

I found that his father, Senator Champ Clark of Missouri, posted photos--similar to those Senator Landrieu had--in our cloakrooms, of mutilated bodies. I will read from a document entitled, ``The U.S. Senate Filibusters Against Federal Anti-Lynching Legislation: The Case For A Formal Apology.'' It states:

Unlike in 1935, when senators killed anti-lynching

legislation in just six days, the 1937-38 filibuster took six

weeks. One reason: in April 1937, a Mississippi mob, in

collusion with local law enforcement, removed two African

Americans from their jail cells, whipped them with chains,

gouged out their eyes with ice picks, and put them to death

with acetylene blowtorches. Senator Champ Clark of Missouri

posted photos of these victims' mutilated bodies in the

Senate cloakroom with a caption, ``There have been No

arrests, No indictments and No convictions for any one of the

lynchers. This is NOT a rape case.

One month later, a mob in Georgia, consisting partly of

women and teenage girls, forced its way into a funeral home

and seized the body of a lynched twenty-four-year-old African

American. After dumping the body into the trunk of a car and

carrying it through town in a horn-blowing motorcade, the mob

took it to a baseball field and burned it.

Horror-struck by these incidents, Senators sought to invoke

cloture. If nothing else, they recognized that not only were

African Americans in high lynch states at risk, but their own

constituents were unprotected if they were black and

traveling through these areas. Sadly, after courageously

battling on the Senate floor for six weeks, they abandoned

their effort to obtain cloture.

Six weeks with all this and no action. Historians will no doubt disagree as to a single reason why Senators blocked antilynching legislation in the 1920s through the 1940s. My desire is not to get into motivations. Regardless of their reasoning, one reason that I can see from all this is that there is no reason. There is no rationale. They were clearly wrong. They turned their eyes. They turned their heads. That is why it is so important that we set aside these hours to apologize for this lack of action by the Senate--because there was no reason. There was no tolerance. There was an acceptance and a condonation of vile, hate-filled activity.

Thankfully, justice in our Nation has moved forward and left such despicable acts history. In ignoring the protections of our Founding Fathers, that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, the Senate turned its back on our foundational principles of justice and freedom.

I look around the Chamber and note that all of us serve with a great deal of honor and integrity, and many have throughout our history.

As Ephesians teaches us: All things that are reproved are made manifest by light. This apology has been a long time in coming.

I thank my colleague, Senator Landrieu, for her tireless efforts in getting this resolution agreed to. I thank also leader Frist for making the legislation a priority and taking time on the Senate schedule to recognize the significance of the moment.

I thank the cosponsors. We have nearly 80 cosponsors and will most likely have more by the end of the day. They recognized the importance of a resolution and knew that the Senate owed an apology to the victims of lynching, their families and descendants. I also thank James Allen, as Senator Landrieu has, for his authorship of ``Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America,'' for bringing to us these horrendous, but important, issues and making us react, recognizing how violent and hate-filled they were.

I also thank Janet Langhart Cohen and Mark Planning for their spirited leadership and teamwork in getting support for this resolution. I want to share with my colleagues some excerpts from Ms. Cohen's comments.

While some members of the Senate question why so many of us

have been seeking the passage of this official expression of

apology at this time, the real question is why the Senate

action was not forthcoming decades ago.

This is important for us to understand the meaning for those who are descendants of victims of lynching and torture and whipping.

She continues:

Consider the scope and depth of the crimes committed

against humanity: more than four thousand men and women were

hung from trees, many of them disembowled, their limbs and

organs amputated, and then set on fire. These heinous acts .

. . were designed to terrify African American citizens,

remind them that they have fewer rights and protections than

animals, and drive them from their land--all while serving as

entertainment for white society.

The point is, this was to intimidate people.

Ms. Cohen says that she comes to the Senate today--she is in the gallery with many other descendants--for many reasons. She writes:

As a Black woman, as the spouse of a former Senator, and as

one who had a family member lynched, I need to bear witness

to an act of decency that has been deferred, indeed

filibustered, for far too long.

We know she is here with many others and recognize that it has been filibustered far too long.

She also states that:

It's important to remind the American people about the evil

chapters in our history. It is the reason we construct

museums in Washington and beyond, to hold up for all to see

how capable we are of descending into the heart of darkness.

It's important for us to look back into the past so that we

can pledge never again to allow racial hatred to consume our

ideals or humanity.

President Bush, in his second inaugural address, stated:

Our country must abandon all habits of racism because we

cannot carry the message of freedom and the baggage of

bigotry at the same time.

She concludes with these statements:

An apology, I concede, will do nothing for the thousands of

people who perished during what has been called ``the Black

Holocaust.'' It cannot repair the battered souls of their

survivors. It is, after all, only a symbolic act. Our

symbols, however, the Eagle, Old Glory, Lady Liberty, to

mention but a few, are but short hand narratives of who we

are as Americans.

It is through an acknowledgment of the Senate's abdication

of its duty to protect and defend the rights of all American

citizens that, perhaps, we can begin to understand the pain

and anger that still lingers in

the hearts and minds of so many who have been deprived of the

equality promised in our Constitution.

My friend and mentor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once

said that ``the arc of history bends toward justice.''

Today, as the Senate Members cast their historic votes,

that arc dips closer to its destination.

Signed, Janet Langhart Cohen.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the full letter be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, I am proud that this resolution will pass tonight. The Senate is going to be on record condemning the brutal atrocities that plagued our great Nation for over a century.

I will close with the words of our resolution:

Whereas, an apology offered in the spirit of true

repentance moves the United States toward reconciliation and

may become central to a new understanding, on which improved

racial relations can be forged. Now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the Senate--

(1) apologizes to the victims of lynching for the failure

of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation;

(2) expresses the deepest sympathies and most solemn

regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of

lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human

dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all

citizens of the United States; and

(3) remembers the history of lynching, to ensure that these

tragedies will be neither forgotten nor repeated.

My colleagues, I ask you to join all of us in examining our history, learn from history, never again sit quietly, and never again turn one's head away when the ugly specter of racism, antisemitism, hate, and intolerance rises again. It is our responsibility to stand strong for freedom and justice.

In the future, I am confident that this Senate will perform better than it has in the past. We will protect the God-given blessings of all people to life and liberty, regardless of their race, their ethnicity, or their religious beliefs. The Senate can do better; we have done better tonight. But the real measure of what we have learned when such acts occur in the future is, will this Senate rise and condemn it to protect those God-given liberties? I know that Senator Landrieu and I believe the Senate will rise appropriately.

Mr. President, with that, I ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding the previous agreement, the Senate now proceed to the vote on the pending resolution; I further ask unanimous consent that notwithstanding adoption of the resolution, the remaining time under the previous agreement remain available for Senators who wish to make statements, provided that any statements relating to the resolution appear prior to its adoption in the Congressional Record.

I thank the Chair.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Mr. President, I join with my colleague, the junior senator from Virginia, to resubmit our resolution of apology for the Senate's failure to pass anti-lynching legislation. We brought this legislation to the Senate's attention in the closing days of the 108th Congress, and indicated then that we would return in February, Black History Month, and seek its adoption his body.

When submitting the resolution earlier, I provided a narrative that described the horrors lynching. It is not necessary to review those facts at this time. The focus of my comments today concerns a critique of the need for this bill. As with many historical errors, there are those who suggest that we are looking at history with twenty-twenty vision. They assert we cannot pass judgment on people living in another context; everyone is blind to their own prejudices, while seeing those of the past clearly.

That is a critique that has a lot of merit in some cases. Societal morays evolve. In fact, our nation's entire history may be viewed as a giant experiment. Viewed from this perspective we find a slow, evolutionary understanding of the meanings of justice, liberty and democracy. However, Senator Allen and I remain confident in what we are seeking to do. The reason is that the Senate's failure to pass anti- lynching legislation is not merely a tragedy now, it was a tragedy then.

Socrates taught us that ``the greatest way to live with honor in this world is

to be what we pretend to be.'' The Senate filibusters that blocked anti-lynching legislation on three separate occasions besmirched the honor of this institution. We style ourselves the greatest deliberative body in the world, yet we showed little real deliberation on those days. We think of ourselves as the ``saucer'' that cools the passions of the House of Representatives. Yet the passions that needed cooling were found in this chamber. We argue that the Senate is the institution that protects the grand traditions of our nation, yet it was the traditions of the Declaration of Independence that we trampled over on those occasions. In short, when we consider the Senate's role in anti- lynching legislation, we simply were not what we pretend to be.

There is other contextual evidence that the Senate was out of step with justice and morality even when viewed at the time. In 1918, in the midst of the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson pleaded for the enactment of anti-lynching legislation. He stated:

There have been many lynchings and every one of them has

been a blow at the heart of ordered law and humane justice.

No man who loves America, no man who really cares for her

fame and honor and character, or who is truly loyal to her

institutions, can justify mob action while the courts of

justice are open and the Governments of the States and the

Nation are ready and able to do their duty . . . We proudly

claim to be the champions of democracy. If we really are in

deed and in truth, let us see to it that we do not discredit

our own. I say, plainly, that every American who takes part

in the action of a mob or gives any sort of countenance is no

true son of this great democracy, but its betrayer, and does

more to discredit her by that single disloyalty to her

standards of law and right than the words or her statesmen or

the sacrifices of her heroic boys in the trenches can do to

make suffering peoples believe her to be their savior.

There are two remarkable things about this quote. First, it is an indication of just how much lynching was impacting our country's reputation. In the middle of an enormous military effort that allied the forces of democracy against the great autocratic empires, the President had to take to reprimand his own countrymen. Furthermore, historians have long noted that President Wilson did not hold particularly progressive views of African Americans. Nevertheless, here he is taking his countrymen to task. Why? Because the injustice of our actions was clear to him, and were being laid bare--rather embarrassingly--before the whole world. While we struggled to demonstrate the strength and righteousness of democracy, we were belying our own story with lynchings. Once again, we simply were not being what we pretended to be.

Finally, I know in my heart that the people of the South were aware of the injustice that they were inflicting on African Americans. I know because I understand how deeply important religion and Christianity are to the people of the South. It pervades every aspect of our culture and history. But it was surely lost on no one in the South that the greatest victim of mob violence was Jesus. When looking at James Allen's book ``Without Sanctuary'' I think people will get a sense of God's suffering. You will also see the tragedy of humanity in the faces of the crowds. You quickly realize that man's inhumanity to man is an ancient question that still plagues us today. Yet in the helpless nobility of the victims, we are also reminded that God intends true peace and justice to come in the next world and not this one.

We have an opportunity today to teach, an opportunity to express remorse, and most importantly an opportunity to be what we pretend to be. In so doing, I hope we may return some of the lost honor of this Chamber.

Mr. President, it has been said that ``ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.'' Sadly, this great body, in which I am so proud to serve, once allied its power with ignorance. In so doing, it condoned unspeakable injustice that diminished the role of the Senate, and heaped untold suffering on Americans sorely in need of our protection. I am referring to the Senate's role in the decades long campaign to end lynching in this country. On three separate occasions, our colleagues in the House of Representatives passed anti- lynching legislation with overwhelming majorities. On all three of those occasions members of this Chamber blocked, or filibustered the consideration of that legislation.

Between 1882, when records first began to be collected, and 1968 4,742 Americans lost their lives to lynch mobs. The experts believe that undocumented cases might double that figure. The vast majority of those killed --3,445 Americans--were African American. Sadly, a disproportionate number of those deaths occurred within my home region of the South, but 46 of the 50 States experienced these atrocities. Lynching was truly a national problem deserving the attention of the national legislative bodies.

Frederick Douglas seems to have captured the real reason for this dark period of our national history. These acts of terrorism were not so much an admission of African Americans' weakness, but of their perseverance, and indomitable spirit. Douglas wrote:

It is proof that the Negro is not standing still. He is not

dead, but alive and active. He is not drifting with the

current, but manfully resisting it . . . A ship rotting at

anchor meets with no resistance, but when she sails on the

sea, she has to buffet opposing billows. The enemies of the

Negro see that he is making progress and they naturally wish

to stop him and keep him in just what they consider his

proper place.

It was, in short, the ability of African Americans to overcome Jim Crow laws, to overcome share-cropping, to overcome second-class citizenship that provoked such savagery. Its an old story that repeats itself throughout human history. Whether it was the Israelites in Egypt, the colonial empires in Africa or America's own history of Apartheid, rulers that assume superiority inevitably prove themselves models of mankind's basest instincts.

It should also be noted that this was not only an outrage committed against African Americans. The effort to dehumanize people on the basis of race or ethnicity did not limit itself to black Americans. In fact, the single largest incident of lynching occurred in my home State, in my home town of New Orleans. Yet, the victims were not black. They were Italians. On March 14, 1891, 11 Italian immigrants were lynched in the city of New Orleans. These immigrants too were thought to be less than human, and were simply rounded up as a group of the ``usual suspects'' following the murder of Police Superintendent David Hennessy. Already edgy from a media prompted Mafia scare, a mob surrounded the prison and eventually battered down the doors. An armed group of 25 men overtook the guards and summarily riddled the bodies of the 11 Italian prisoners with bullets. Their bodies were hung on lampposts outside the prison. Eyewitnesses described the cheering of the crowd as deafening.

Of course, the attacks on that day are an example of mob justice and its irrational prejudices. However, in nearly 25 percent of all lynchings the motivations of the attackers came down to a bald attempt to maintain a caste system in this country. The NAACP cataloged the reported motivations for these forms of attack. They included: using disrespectful, insulting, slanderous, boastful, threatening or incendiary language; insubordination, impertinence, or improper demeanor, a sarcastic grin, laughing at the wrong place, a prolonged silence; refusing to take off one's hat to a white person or to give the right-of-way when encountering a white on the sidewalk; resisting assault by whites; being troublesome generally; disorderly conduct, petty theft or drunkenness; writing an improper letter to a white person; paying undue or improper attention to a white female; accusing a white man of writing love letters to a black woman; or living or keeping company with a white woman; turning or refusing to turn State's evidence; testifying or bringing suit against a white person; being related to a person accused of a crime and already lynched; political activities; union organizing; conjuring; discussing a lynching; gambling; operating a house of ill fame; a personal debt; refusing to accept an employment offer; vagrancy; refusing to give up one's farm; conspicuously displaying one's wealth or property; and trying to act like a white man.

In many instances, lynchings were little more than a way to remove an economic competitor and confiscate his property. This was true in a number of cases in Mississippi involving successful African American landowners,

and in one notorious Hawaiian case involving a Japanese immigrant competing with established white businessmen.

Many of my colleagues might wonder why now? After all, some of these incidents are over a century old. There are two reasons. First, this aspect of American history is not well known or understood. As reconstruction concluded in the South, a very ugly struggle to reassert the social structure that preceded the Civil War took place. A great deal of it occurred with the tacit consent of the Federal Government, and the most part, the media either shared in the common prejudice, or simply ignored what was occurring.

Fortunately, we have the publication of the book ``Without Sanctuary'' by James Allen, Hilton Als, Congressman John Lewis, and Leon F. Litwak to serve as a focal point for our attention to this neglected history. This is a difficult book to examine. It serves as a catalog of inhuman crime perpetrated by very ordinary citizens. Looking at anything so tragic as the victims of these crimes would be disturbing, but that is not what will leave a lasting impression. It is the festive attitude, the smiles and smirks on the crowd gathered around the victim. They clearly take a perverse pride in this act. Hannah Arendt, the famous political philosopher, subtitled her book on Adolph Eichman's war crimes trials ``A Report on the Banality of Evil.'' When you look at the expressions on the faces of the murders in these photos, that is all you can think about. These are not crazed killers, these are rational people going about their every day lives, and committing unspeakable acts in the process.

Photos like these serve to remind us that a healthy society is not something that is built up over time, and then like a great monument, exists for centuries. Rather, a healthy society is a thin levee that must be constantly improved and maintained to hold back the worst instincts of mankind. I think the horrible pictures that came from Abu Gharib prison served as a reminder of this lesson. This book is even greater testimony that atrocities are not events that only occur in far off places. They can and have occurred here in the United States.

The only way to maintain a healthy society is to acknowledge and discuss our mistakes. No one would defend the Senate's filibuster of anti-lynching legislation today. I would like to think that any Senator who did so would quickly be looking for another line of work. However, despite the change of attitude we have taken no action to remedy our wrong. That is the purpose of this resolution today. I would like to extend my deep thanks to my courageous colleague, the Junion Senator from Virginia. He seemed to instantly understand the significance of this effort, and I believe it was vitally important to proceed with this resolution in a bipartisan manner. His input and drive have made this effort much more successful than it otherwise would have been.

It is our intention to introduce this legislation today, and use the recess period to confer with our colleagues about it. When we reconvene next year, we will re-introduce this resolution, and at that time, we hope to have the co-sponsorship of every member of this body. Then, we endeavor to enact the resolution to commemorate Black History month.

I said ignorance allied with power is justice's most ferocious enemy. Yet imagine what truth allied with power can bring. For over 50 years, African American achievement was seen as a threat to the majority of people in this nation. It is time to close the book on that tragic period and begin to celebrate the achievements of black Americans as accomplishments that have bettered us all. I believe that this resolution of apology will be an important symbolic step in this process of healing and growth.

Mr. President, we have all heard the expression, ``To err is human.'' We teach our children that mistakes are okay because we learn from them. However, there are some mistakes that are more costly to make than others. In 2000, the Institute of Medicine released a report entitled, ``To Err is Human: Building a Safer Health System.'' The report revealed the following devastating statistic: every year, between 44,000 and 98,000 hospitalized people in the United States die due to medical errors.

Science has not yet found a cure to cancer or even the common cold, but it has discovered a way to prevent the thousands of fatalities that occur every year due to medical errors. The Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations developed a universal protocol that calls for surgical teams to literally call a ``time out'' before surgeries begin. This ``time out'' serves a brief period for surgeons and nurses to verify the patient's identity, the procedure to be performed, and the site of the procedure. Endorsed by the American College of Surgeons, the American Society of Anesthesiologists, the American Hospital Association, the Association of periOperative Registered Nurses, and the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, this idea of a ``time out'' may seem almost simplistic, but the fact of the matter is even the best surgeon in the world can make a very costly mistake if he or she does not stop for a moment for surgery and take a ``time out.

Therefore, it is my pleasure to rise today to submit this resolution, which promotes a National Time Out Day and promotes the adoption of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organization's universal protocol for preventing errors in the operating room.

To err may be human, but for the thousands of relatives that are currently sitting in a hospital waiting room, waiting for a loved one to come out of surgery, human error is not an acceptable answer.

Mr. President, this is an issue that will be considered by the Senate later this evening, an issue of historic importance. It will be an official apology by the Senate for the Senate's failure to protect victims of lynching in America.

Fifty years ago, on August 20, 1955, a Chicago woman named Mamie Till took her 14-year-old son Emmett to the 63rd Street Station in Chicago to catch the southbound train to Mississippi. Emmett was going to spend the summer with his great uncle and aunt in a town called Money, MS, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.

The next day, August 21, 1955, young Emmett Till arrived in Mississippi. He spent the next few days helping out around the house, working with his great uncle, Moses Wright, in the cotton fields.

On August 24, after a long day of working in the fields, Emmett and a group of teenagers went into town to Bryant's Grocery Store for some refreshments. The store--owned by a White couple named Roy and Carolyn Bryant--served primarily Black workers, sharecroppers, and their kids. Emmett went into Bryant's Grocery Store to buy some bubble gum. Some kids who were hanging out outside the store accused Emmett of whistling at Carolyn Bryant, one of the proprietors of the store.

Four days later, on August 28, Carolyn Bryant's husband and his half brother went to Moses Wright's home at 2:30 in the morning. They kidnapped young Emmett Till from his bed, and they committed one of the most notorious and horrific lynchings in American history. They brutally beat this young man from Chicago, IL, Emmett Till. They gouged out his eyes, they shot him in the head, they tied a large metal fan around his neck with barbed wire, and they threw his mangled, dead body into the Tallahatchie River.

A few days later, his broken and bloated body was found floating in the river. Emmett Till was returned to his mother in Chicago in a coffin. On September 3, 1955, Mamie Till held a historic funeral for her son at Roberts Temple Church of God in Chicago. She did a courageous thing: She directed that the casket remain open so that everyone could see what hatred and racism had done to her little boy.

Tens of thousands of Chicagoans came to say goodbye to 14-year-old Emmett Till, a young man who just a few weeks before got on that train to visit his family in Mississippi. News coverage of that funeral reached millions more around the world. Jet Magazine made a historic decision: They decided to print actual photographs of Emmett Till's mutilated body lying in the casket and cover his funeral. The decision by that magazine and the publicity that came with Emmett Till's tragic death changed people across America. I cannot tell you how many African Americans I have met who said that the world changed after the murder of Emmett Till. They came to realize that what happened to him should not be allowed to happen in America.

One of my favorite friends in Congress, one of my heroes of all time, is a man named John Lewis. He represents Atlanta, GA, as a Member of the House of Representatives. He was one of the pioneers in the civil rights movement. He was 15 years old, 1 year older than Emmett Till, growing up in Alabama, when he saw those photographs of this young man. Like millions of African Americans, John Lewis was haunted by the image. He told a Washington Post reporter recently: I remember thinking it can happen to anyone, me or my brothers or my cousins. It created a sense of fear that it could happen to anyone who got out of line.

Those images of Emmett Till inspired more than fear. In many people, they inspired courage and resolve. There was a decision made by so many at every level of life in America to no longer ever tolerate the brutal inhumanity of hatred and racism of Jim Crow laws. When Rosa Parks, the legendary civil rights leader, refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, AL, it was 100 days after Emmett Till's murder. She said, when asked later: How did you show the strength to do that, stand up against everybody and say, no, I will not sit in the back of the bus, she said she got her courage by thinking of that young man, Emmett Till.

Eight years later, in a song entitled ``The Murder of Emmett Till,'' the great poet/songwriter Bob Dylan had the following lyrics:

If you can't speak out against this kind of thing,

a crime that's so unjust,

your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt,

your mind is filled with dust.

Today, 50 years after Emmett Till's brutal murder, the Senate will formally and officially offer apologies to not just the families of Emmett Till but the nearly 4,800 other Americans who died at the hands of lynch mobs in our country, in this great Nation of America, between 1882 and 1968. We offer our apologies as well to the countless millions of Americans who were forced to live with the fear that they could be the next victim.

Emmett Till's cousin, Simeon Wright, was lying next to Emmett the night he was kidnapped and lynched. Simeon Wright is with us today. Doria Johnson, from Evanston, IL, also is with us today. Her grandfather, Anthony Crawford, was lynched by a White mob in Abbeville, SC, in 1916. He was beaten, hanged, and shot more than 200 times. What kind of offense would merit that kind of punishment? What had Anthony Crawford done? Anthony Crawford, in 1916, in South Carolina, a Black man, got into an argument with a White man over the price of cotton seed at a store.

To them and to all who lost a loved one to lynching and to those who lost a piece of their own childhood and their own sense of security, we say today formally and officially in the Senate that we were wrong-- wrong for failing to protect them, wrong because we never said we were sorry.

The murders of Emmett Till and Anthony Crawford are among those documented in a groundbreaking book and museum exhibit called ``Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America.'' The exhibit has traveled all over the United States and opened just last week at the Chicago Historical Society.

Mr. President, just a few days ago, the Chicago Sun-Times did an editorial on this issue of lynching and this exhibit. I ask unanimous consent that the editorial be printed in the Record.

Mr. President, this editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times urges people to attend the exhibit and notes that ``many young Chicagoans probably do not know how widespread this crime was or that it occurred outside of the South in places such as

downstate Cairo,'' IL. That is an important point. Lynching was not just a southern shame, it was an American shame. While most lynchings occurred in the South, they also happened in the North.

I commend Senators Mary Landrieu and George Allen for authoring this resolution and working so hard to have the Senate take it up and right this historical wrong. It is my hope the Senate will match the words of this resolution with action. It is not enough to apologize for the failure of our predecessors to protect their fellow citizens from violent prejudice. We have a responsibility to protect those who are targets of today's hate crimes as well. Senator Ted Kennedy, a Democrat, and Senator Gordon Smith, a Republican, have been trying for years to persuade Congress to pass a new, stronger Federal hate crimes bill. Year after year, they have met with resistance.

Listen to the arguments of those who oppose a stronger hate crimes bill today, and you hear the same arguments that were made against a Federal antilynching bill decades ago. The names have changed, the arguments and the excuses are the same.

They say we in Congress cannot pass a strong hate crimes bill because it will infringe on States rights or because the Constitution does not give Congress explicit authority to pass such a law.

Listen to what a Member of the House of Representatives, James Woods of Virginia, said in 1922:

This bill, commonly known as the ``anti-lynching bill''

would be described more accurately if designated--from the

standpoint of its effects rather than from its purpose--as a

``bill to override the Constitution of the United States, to

foment race hatred, and to revive sectional animosity.'' If

it were possible to put an end to lynching by a lawful act of

Congress, none would support such legislation more earnestly

than we of the South.

The Constitution does not say anything explicitly about the Civil Rights Act, which the Senate passed 41 years ago, or the Voting Rights Act, which turns 40 today. There always will be political voices that will find excuses to delay acting on the moral challenges of our time.

Finding the moral courage to deal with those challenges in our own time is the real test of leadership. What is it we are doing or failing to do today that would lead the Senate 50 years from now to apologize? That is the question.

I hope Congress will pass the Kennedy-Smith hate crimes bill as tangible proof to the victims of lynching that we will never again withhold our protection when Americans are persecuted and killed simply for being who they are.

When Mamie Till put her son on that train for Mississippi, he was wearing a watch he had been given by his father before his father died. The hands on that watch stopped when Emmitt Till was tortured and murdered.

Much has changed in the 50 years since Emmitt Till died, but some small part of America's soul has always remained frozen in that time because of our failure to formally acknowledge that what happened was wrong. By apologizing to the victims of lynching--and by having the courage to protect the victims of hate crimes today--we can reclaim that piece of our soul and move forward in time as one Nation indivisible.

What is the status of the time? Is it under control, or is it just open?

Mr. President, I start by thanking Senator Landrieu and Senator Allen for their leadership on this effort and for all those descendants of families who have been absolutely extraordinary in the way in which they relived their pain, brought it to the public view, kind of laid their hearts out on the table in a very real and emotional way--that has been a wonderful part of this process--and the way in which the book Jimmy Allen put together has helped to unleash a pain that was never lost, never forgotten by anybody, but never quite had a place to play itself out--until this public effort that is being made by the Senate.

There is no small irony, I suspect, in the fact that the Senate is here sort of making good on what the Senate failed to do. I personally am struck by even, at this significant moment, the undeniable and inescapable reality that there are not 100 Senators as cosponsors. Maybe by the end of the evening there will be, but as we stand here with this resolution passed by voice vote, there are not.

Moreover, all the people in the Senate and the press understand how we work here. It is critical that we take the step we are taking and have taken, but at the same time wouldn't it have been just that much more extraordinary and significant if we were having a recorded vote with all 100 Senators recording their votes? We are not.

So even today, as we take this gigantic step, we are also saying to America that there is a journey still to travel. I don't want to diminish one iota--and I don't mean to because I believe what is happening here today is so significant, but at the same time, it has to give all of us a kind of kick in the rear end to get us out there to do that which is necessary, which gives fuller meaning to the words that are going to be expressed here and have been expressed here--most important, to give fuller meaning to the emotions that have been laid bare for all of America to understand better by the families who have come here to share this with us.

I also join not just in thanking Mr. Cameron and Ms. Johnson, and others, but Janet Langhart, who is here with our former colleague and the former Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen. We certainly appreciate her commitment to this effort and the meaning of this to her and to all of the families who have come here together.

It is pretty incredible to think about it. Lynchings really replaced slavery. They came in the aftermath of slavery, around the 1880s. Between the 1880s and 1968--I have to pause when I think about that because I was already a young officer in the military. I had left college. I remember the early part of the 1960s devoted to the civil rights movement, the Mississippi voter registration drive. We were still recording lynchings during that period of time, but I did not know it, not in the sense that we know it today.

I thought I knew history pretty well, but I will tell you, until I saw this array of photographs which then sparked my curiosity to read more about it, I had always thought, like most Americans, that a lynching was just slinging a rope over a branch of a tree and that was it. The story is so much more gruesome than that, so much more dark and horrendous as a moment in American history that it is really hard to believe it happened at all in our country, which is another reason it is so important that we are taking this step to remember.

We have seen revisionism in almost every part of history, including the Holocaust. So it is good we are taking this step today, and it is good we have these photographs now brought together as a compilation of history, and it is good that the Senate is taking this effort tonight.

It is extraordinary to think that 99 percent of the perpetrators of lynchings escaped any reach of the law whatsoever. It is incredible to think that almost 5,000 people are recorded as incidents, and how many are not recorded? How many went without the local authorities in each of those communities--who were already complicitous in what happened, standing by, permissive, turning away from basic human rights--how many of those incidents were not recorded?

A lot of us have read a lot about World War II and the Holocaust and other moments of history where there is a knock on the door and life changes. But you have to stop and really think what it was like in all but four States in our country, not just for African Americans but for new people, for folks who had come here from other places to live the American dream. In some cases, they were not knocks, they were just angry mobs screaming and yelling with torches and running rampant through a household, dragging out people screaming. In other cases, there was a pretext, more polite, but it was never polite in what it ended up as.

Lynchings were not just lynchings; they were organized torture. They were incidents of kinds of torture that defied imagination, about which you do not even want to talk, the kinds of things that any decent society ought to stand up against. People were literally tortured for sport in front of people, and crowds would cheer--bedlam. Children were brought to be spectators. Some of these photographs show kids standing there with their eyes wide open and adults standing beside them, who were supposed to be more responsible, glued to the horror they were witnessing.

In the first half of the last century alone, in the 20th century, over 200 antilynching bills were introduced in the Congress--200. Three times, the House of Representatives passed antilynching legislation. Seven Presidents asked for this legislation to be passed. The Senate said no.

So it is important that we are here today to apologize. Some people wonder what the effect of an apology is. We can understand that question being asked. This is sort of a day of reckoning for us as a country, it is a moment for the conscience of our country to be listened to by everybody. It is an embarrassingly and unforgivably late moment in coming, but we are addressing a stain on our history, and we are working to heal wounds across generations. I believe that is important. Some people might try to diminish that, but the very lack of unity I mentioned earlier, in fact, goes to show why this apology is so important and why we all have to keep moving in this direction.

No words, obviously, are going to undo the horror of those 5,000 Americans losing their lives. No apology is going to just wipe away the memories of Mr. Cameron and others, though they have shown a greater graciousness of understanding than others even at this moment.

The fact is that this resolution can be one more step in the effort for all of us to try to get over the divide that still exists between races and as a result of Jim Crow in this country, but only if we face the truth. It is the Bible that reminds us that it is the truth that sets us free. And so it is that we have to embrace it, commit ourselves to putting our hearts and our actions where our words have now preceded us. This should be an important step forward, but, frankly, it will only do that if we do not stop here.

The truth is that it is not enough to face the horror of lynchings if we then just walk out of here and consciously turn away from legally separate and unequal schools in America. It is not enough to decry decades of refusing to use the force of law against lynchings if today we refuse to use the force of law to tear down the barriers that prevent people from voting, barriers in the economy, divisions in the health care system that works for too few of those who are in the minority in America.

It is only by reconciling the past that we have to understand where we have to go in the future and get there. I remind my colleagues to remember the words of Julian Bond when he dedicated that beautiful, simple memorial in Montgomery, AL, to those who gave their lives for civil rights. He said it was erected as much to remember the dead as it was for those young people who cannot remember the period when the sacrifices began, with its small cruelties and monstrous injustices, its petty indignities and its death dealing in inequities. There are many too young to remember that from that seeming hopelessness, there arose a mighty movement, simple in its tactics, overwhelming in its impact. That is why we have to remember the period

of the lynchings. That is why this resolution is important--for the young people who do not know what it means to wake up in the middle of the night to hear that knock, for young people to need to commit to help our country complete the journey in order to guarantee we make it all that it promises to be and can be.

We will never erase what Mr. Cameron or Mr. Wright and too many others went through, but we certainly can honor the legacy of these civil rights heroes and the martyrs who came before us by doing right by them and by the country. I hope this resolution will help us do that.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I yield such time to the Senator from Illinois as he should use.