JACKSON - Thad Cochran and Trent Lott had an ideal opportunity two weeks ago to make a statement on behalf of a new day of racial reconciliation in Mississippi, and they blew it.
By an 80-0 voice vote, the Senate adopted a bipartisan resolution apologizing for that body's refusal, largely because of filibusters by Southern senators, to enact anti-lynching bills during the 1930s, 1940s and even the 1950s.
But adoption of the formal apology to lynching victims and their descendants came without the votes of Mississippi's two senators.
Our senators had every reason, especially with national and world attention focused on the trial of former Klansman Edgar Ray Killen for the 1964 lynch-style murders of three young civil rights workers, to have been in the forefront of the Senate's momentous apology for their predecessors' refusal to enact legislation to stop the reign of racial terror that once flourished in this country.
Cochran's failure to sign on to the resolution was especially disappointing to many Mississippians who have admired him for often taking moderate stances on public issues.
His rationale that he saw no reason to apologize for something that happened when he was not in the Senate is a lame excuse - especially since in the past he has joined in apologies for several of the nation's wrongs committed against Japanese-Americans, native Americans and Hawaiians.
Lott, due to his costly endorsement three years ago of Strom Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat racist platform (with a pro-lynch plank), had even more reason to apologize. By his Dixiecrat foray, Lott tacitly joined the chorus opposing anti-lynching legislation.
When the Senate apology measure came up, Lott simply got out of Dodge, then ducking queries from many news people for several days. Finally cornered for a comment, Lott made some banal statement: "Where do we end all of this? Are we going to apologize for not doing the right thing on Social Security?"
Anyone who has seen the "Without Sanctuary," collection, the hundreds of photographs of lynching victims swinging from a tree or burned to a crisp as a crowd of onlookers, among them children, ogled the lifeless bodies as at a sporting event, can understand the resolution's genesis.
Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., and Sen. George Allen, R.-Va., admitted they were moved by the photos to sponsor the apology resolution. And when the Senate adopted it, some 200 ancestors of lynching victims, including a 91-year-old black man from Indiana who survived a lynching, were on hand.
Obviously apologetic words now can't bring restitution for the more than 4,000 human beings - not all of them black - known to have lost their lives at the hands of lynch mobs over several decades following the Civil War, well into the 20th century.
But it was a powerfully symbolic gesture, appropriately since the U.S. Senate had been the graveyard of legislation that may have saved the lives of hundreds of lynching victims.
Senator Landrieu poignantly reminded her colleagues, "there may be no other injustice in American history for which the Senate so uniquely bears responsibility."
Between 1920 and 1940, the U.S. House three times had passed anti-lynching measures, only to see them filibustered to death by Southern senators on the other end of Congress.
Mississippi's revered Sen. Pat Harrison of Gulfport, during his years as a key ally of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, had remained relatively silent on anti-lynching bills. But in 1937 when FDR dumped him as Senate president pro tempore, Harrison joined the Southern filibuster troops.
In a celebrated 1938 Senate floor debate on the House-passed Wagner-Van Nuys Bill, Harrison pulled out the ultimate weapon of Dixie anti-lynching foes: that rape (or suspected rape) committed by a black man was "the foulest crime against the fairest flower that grows" and justified a lynching.
As had other Southern senatorial filibusterers, Harrison contended Northern proponents misunderstood the South and argued anti-lynching measures made "great inroads upon the police powers and sovereign rights of a state."
Once, when members of the Student Union at Millsaps College petitioned Harrison's Mississippi colleague, Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo, to support the anti-lynching bill, Bilbo branded the organization communistic and demanded an investigation of all Mississippi college organizations.
Mississippi's notorious racial demagogue, Gov. (and for a brief time U.S. Sen.) James K. Vardaman, known as the "White Chief," evidenced a strange ambivalence toward lynching because of his abhorrence for capital punishment. He made one concession: that mobs should lynch their victims as quickly and simply as possible, writes his biographer, William F. Holmes.
Mississippi generally is regarded as the nation's leader in the number of lynchings from the 1880s until the 1960s. But in the Tuskegee Institute records of lynchings compiled for the years between 1890 and 1931, Georgia had slightly more than Mississippi's 345 lynchings.
The 1920s marked the highest number of recorded lynchings. They were not confined to the South by any means. Lynchings, as evidenced by the "Without Sanctuary" collection, occurred in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Nebraska.
In his valuable 1947 book, "The Negro in Mississippi 1865-1890," former Millsaps history professor Vernon Lane Wharton relates how offhandedly Mississippi newspapers reported lynchings in those days, some listing them merely in small type under "Miscellaneous News."
The Raymond Gazette in 1885, Wharton says, managed to get into a single sentence five lynchings which had occurred around the state. It read "Four negroes (little N) were lynched at Grenada last week; also one at Oxford."
It's evident we have so much to apologize for.
