Sen. George Allen says that if the United States is to be successful in promoting freedom around the world, it must acknowledge the "warts" on its own history.
So the Virginia Republican has joined with Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Louisiana Democrat, to co-sponsor a resolution issuing an apology for the Senate's refusal to support anti-lynching legislation to help stem the tide of thousands of racially motivated murders from 1890 to 1964.
"We're proud of our history in Virginia and America," Allen said during an interview with The Free Lance-Star. "But there are certain things you ought to apologize for. The Senate should apologize."
Allen said 4,749 people, mostly blacks, were hanged, flogged and torched to death--all acts defined as "lynching" in all regions of the country.
"Despite these vile acts against the innocent, the United States Senate failed to pass one piece of legislation making lynching a federal crime," Allen said in a written statement last week calling for an apology.
"This resolution has us on record admitting there are warts on our history," Allen explained in a telephone interview. "But it's the greatest country on the face of the Earth.
"As we try to fight injustice around the world, we must recognize sometimes we made mistakes," he said.
"This isn't about reparations," Allen said. It is about acknowledging that the Senate should have been more aggressive in trying to stem the tide of lynchings in an 80-year period of terror that ended for the most part when the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964.
Seven presidents requested anti-lynching legislation, but a law was never enacted.
From 1882 to 1968, at least 200 separate bills were introduced in Congress to make lynching a federal crime, Allen said. The U.S. House passed three of those bills, but, Allen said, a group of senators opposed to such protection blocked the legislation through filibusters and other tactics during the first half of the 20th century.
The apology legislation is being supported by civil-rights movement veterans including Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., E. Faye Williams, Martin Luther King III, C. Delores Tucker and Janet Langhart.
The word "lynch" was derived from the last name of Charles Lynch, a Virginian who hanged Tories--British sympathizers during the Revolutionary War--without benefit of a trial, Allen said. The city of Lynchburg was named after the Lynch family.
In 1904, Fredericksburg Police Sgt. J. Conway Chichester saved Charles H. Blandford, a black man, from lynching at the hands of a mob of 50 people.
Such interventions by police were rare during the period, historians say.
Claudine Ferrell, a University of Mary Washington historian who is an expert on lynchings, said 75 percent of the approximately 5,000 people lynched in America from 1890 through the early 1950s were black. American Indians, Jews and Asians made up most of the other 25 percent, she said.
In Virginia, 100 people were lynched--83 blacks and 17 whites--according to the Tuskegee Institute.
"Most people think of a simple Old West-type hanging," Ferrell said, "but lynching was absolutely gruesome. Men, [and] also women, were shot, hanged, beaten, burned.
"Anything that lynchers could think of, they did, including slow torture and burning to death--or use of a blow torch, with body parts cut off and given to observers, in front of thousands on a Sunday afternoon after church," she said.
Sometimes, Ferrell said, souvenir postcards were sold depicting the victim and his murderers. And, she said, there were times when body parts were displayed in store windows.
"The horror of lynching was, in part, that no black was safe," Ferrell said.
"Lynching could be totally random--someone pointed a finger at a black; if the mob did not find the right person, they were willing to kill anyone," she said.
"Clearly, these acts were state-sanctioned--or at least accepted--inequality before the law and a violation of the 14th Amendment," she said. She described lynching as a form of terrorism through which white racists tried to hold blacks down.
Allen said anti-lynching legislation was needed during this period because state and local governments were sometimes reluctant to prosecute, or lacked the resources to properly investigate, lynchings.
Due to a combination of racism and states'-rights issues, numerous proposals to make lynching a federal crime were defeated, Ferrell said.
Ferrell said there were some sincere men in Congress outraged by the barbaric practice who voted for a federal anti-lynching bill "for reasons of morality, justice and equality."
Ferrell said those legislators tended to come from states outside the South and tended to be Republicans.
David Snepp, an Allen aide, said comedian and civil-rights activist Dick Gregory sent a letter to every member of the Senate asking for help, but only Allen and Landrieu responded.
Gregory has also sought to change the name of the Russell Senate Office Building because it's named for the late Richard Russell of Georgia, who was a staunch segregationist. He repeatedly blocked federal legislation intended to stem the tide of lynchings.
Snepp said Allen doesn't favor changing the building's name because "that isn't the issue we're facing right now" and such an effort could shift the focus from passing the lynching apology resolution.
Staff reporter Jim Hall contributed to this story.
To reach MICHAEL ZITZ: 540/374-5408 mikez@freelancestar.com