Belated apology

last updated 8 January 2015

Washington, D.C.

The Senate this week apologized for never passing a law to ban lynching. The House passed anti-lynching bills three times over the years, but some Southern senators always refused to go along. As many as 5,000 people, most of them black men in the South, are estimated to have been killed by lynching between 1882 and 1968. The Senate resolution called lynching “the ultimate expression of racism in the United States” in the years following Reconstruction. “It’s 100-something years too late,” said James Cameron, 91, an African-American who was nearly hanged by a white mob when he was 16. “But I’m glad they’re doing it.”