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U.S. Senate tackles lynching way too late

4 min read

Having failed to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the U.S. government’s company line quickly turned to, “Well, at least we got rid of Saddam Hussein, the dictator who had brutalized and terrorized his own people. Why, he even gassed the Kurds. Remember that?” So the war-making logic goes something like this: You can – and perhaps even should – militarily invade a sovereign nation when its leadership fails to protect all its citizens. The urgency is double-fold when that government permits, and maybe even carries out, such atrocities.

Against this backdrop of modern political logic, it was with great interest that I read a recent article detailing how the U.S. Senate had voted to acknowledge its own failure to stand up against the lynching of black U.S. citizens. This despicable practice continued well after the Civil War, with Congress introducing almost 200 anti-lynching bills between 1882 and 1968, as I understood the Associated Press report.

It said that seven U.S. presidents petitioned Congress to pass a federal law against lynching, and noted that Tuskegee University logged 4,743 incidents of people in the United States being killed by mob violence between 1882 and 1968. Three-fourths of them were black, which means that lynching affected white people, too.

Three times the U.S. House passed a bill that basically would have made lynching a federal crime. But guess what happened? Southern conservatives in the U.S. Senate used their filibuster power to kill the bill. That’s the same filibuster power, by the way, that recently came under fire as a bad thing regarding the holding up of some of President Bush’s judicial appointments. It’s too bad, tragic in fact, that no one was similarly offended by its use to halt anti-lynching proposals.

Juxtaposing this story with what happened in Iraq, I began to wonder what the reaction would have been if some other country – say, Canada – had said to the United States in 1950, “We’ve had enough of how you Americans are treating blacks (and some whites). We are invading you to put a stop to this, for your own good.”

Chances are very good that such an invasion would have been met with the same type of fervor that some Iraqis continue displaying against our presence on their soil. But the logic behind the move would have been essentially the same: removal of a government that wasn’t doing all that it could to protect the rights of minority groups.

Please don’t try making me out as “unpatriotic” for bringing up this comparison. That won’t work, and there were too many World War II veterans in my family to make that accusation stick. I just want you to think about this country’s well-documented use and abuse of minority groups. Slavery of blacks stands as the prime example, but I’d also include the plight of many current Hispanics and those Europeans who, like my ancestors, worked for subsistence wages in dangerous coal mines.

Before we point a finger at Iraq or any other nation for its abuses of human rights, we should take a long and hard look at what’s been sanctioned in our own back yard. I’m old enough to remember the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and how contentious the issues of school integration and voting rights were in the South, which a younger generation may best know as those “red” states when viewing presidential election results.

Much of this dirty laundry, including lynchings, happened in the United States of America, during the lifetimes of many still-living citizens. Some of it happened after World War II, when we’d fought the Axis powers to remove tyranny and dictatorships elsewhere. And the historical record shows that equal treatment under the law was often a wink-wink, nod-nod concept through the 1960s, when the federal government finally got around to passing civil rights legislation.

It’s too bad that the U.S. Senate didn’t act sooner on some other important bills that came its way. Maybe we’d be in a lot better position to criticize the behavior of other nations if it had.

Paul Sunyak is editorial page editor of the Herald-Standard. He can be reached at (724) 439-7577 or at psunyak@heraldstandard.com

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