Prometheus 6

The reason I'm not impressed by the Senate:

Although the Senate garnered praise on Monday for acting to erase that stain, some critics said lawmakers had a long way to go. Of the 100 senators, 80 were co-sponsors of the resolution, and because it passed by voice vote, senators escaped putting themselves on record.

"It's a statement in itself that there aren't 100 co-sponsors," Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said.

As for the article, I do not want to minimize Mr. Cameron's story but it's the typical "Black man accused of rape is lynched" story, except someone stepped up and cleared him before he was hanged.

I'd rather you listed to the story of Anthony Crawford...lynched for refusing to be cheated.

DORIA DEE JOHNSON: Yes. Grandpa Crawford was able to accumulate 427 acres of prime cotton land. In addition to that, he was president of the Black Masons of South Carolina. He started a school on his land, called the Abbeville School, for black children. He was a voter. He served on the federal jury and started a union of black farmers; so he was just a very prosperous man. He also had 13 children who all lived on his property and worked for him and had their own homes.

Well, Oct. 21, 1916, Grandpa Crawford went to downtown Abbeville, South Carolina, to sell his cotton seed. He stood in line with the rest of the farmers. But when he got to the front of the line, W.D. Barksdale, who was the storekeeper, offered Grandpa Crawford 85 cents for his cotton seed when it was really worth 90 cents.

GWEN IFILL: This was a white man.

DORIA DEE JOHNSON: It was. Grandpa Crawford told Mr. Barksdale that he was cheating him, and Mr. Barksdale called Grandpa Crawford a liar. At that point someone else in the store came in after Grandpa Crawford. He fought them; in fact, he fought with 12 people backing out of his store and towards the square. But a sheriff had arrested him for cursing a white man; he was taken to jail.

GWEN IFILL: We've heard so much about lynchings that usually arise out of a black man whistling at a white woman, in the case of Emmett Till or other cases. In this case, this was about property; this was about land; this was about resources.

DORIA DEE JOHNSON: Yes.

GWEN IFILL: Very different.

DORIA DEE JOHNSON: Well, no. I don't think so. I think that if you really do the research you're going to find that a lot of people who were lynched were community leaders, business owners, people who threatened the ethos of white supremacy, people who were going to be respected. And these are the people that were lynched.

GWEN IFILL: So how many people were involved in this lynching and how did it occur?

DORIA DEE JOHNSON: The governor's report says 400 people. But what they did was probably it gotten up to be about 200 people and Grandpa Crawford was finally taken from the jail. The jail was overtaken from the sheriff. He was drug down the stairs to the back of a buggy.

GWEN IFILL: And he was killed. He was hanged. He was shot.

DORIA DEE JOHNSON: He was stabbed, beaten and hung from a tree. And his children were ordered to leave town. And they had to start all over again wherever they ended up. Sorry.

GWEN IFILL: So all the land that he owned went away. The family inherited nothing. How did the community...

DORIA DEE JOHNSON: That's right.

GWEN IFILL: How did the community react of Abbeville?

DORIA DEE JOHNSON: A lot of blacks of Abbeville left.

GWEN IFILL: Because they felt unsafe there?

DORIA DEE JOHNSON: That's right. If Mr. Crawford were lynched like that, then how safe are the rest of us?

Senate Issues Apology Over Failure on Lynching Law
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, June 13 - Anthony Crawford's granddaughter went to her grave without speaking a word to her own children about his lynching, so painful was the family history. On Monday, Mr. Crawford's descendants came to the Capitol to tell it - and to accept a formal apology from the Senate for its repeated failure, despite the requests of seven presidents, to enact a federal law to make lynching a crime.

The formal apology, adopted by voice vote, was issued decades after senators blocked antilynching bills by filibuster. The resolution is the first time that members of Congress, who have apologized to Japanese-Americans for their internment in World War II and to Hawaiians for the overthrow of their kingdom, have apologized to African-Americans for any reason, proponents of the measure said.

"The Senate failed you and your ancestors and our nation," Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, chief Democratic sponsor of the resolution, said at a luncheon attended by 200 family members and descendants of victims. They included 100 relatives of Anthony Crawford, as well as a 91-year-old man believed to be the only known survivor of an attempted lynching.