Repairing Senate's Record on Lynching

Guyot, who worked to overturn Jim Crow laws in the 1960s, said the legislation fits a pattern of efforts across the country. They include the FBI's reopening of the investigation into Till's lynching and the prosecution of suspected Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen in the 1964 slaying of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. That trial is set to start Monday.

"There is no statute of limitations on murder and no statute of limitations on doing what is right," Guyot said. "This is a time in American history when not only is it possible to have coalitions across racial lines, but also necessary. Reconciliation is needed to make that happen."

Janet Langhart Cohen, wife of former senator and defense secretary William S. Cohen and a member of the apology committee, said the Senate should have acted unsolicited.

"It's all I can do to repress my rage that we have to ask them, in the name of decency, to say you are sorry," said Langhart Cohen, who lives in Chevy Chase.

She grew up hearing stories about the lynching of her third cousin, Jimmy Gillenwaters, near Bowling Green, Ky., in 1912. In her book "From Rage to Reason: My Life in Two Americas" and in a recent interview, she recalled how her grandmother and uncles repeated the story for years, recounting every detail.

Gillenwaters, 17, was the oldest of three children raised on a farm owned by Langhart Cohen's grandfather. As landowners, her grandparents said they were always keenly aware of the danger their success posed because of jealous neighbors.

"One night the nightriders came to scare them -- that's what they did in those days. They would ride by, set fire to a house or shoot," Langhart Cohen said. "After the shots stopped, they thought everyone was accounted for.

"The next morning, they noticed that Jimmy was gone, and my Aunt Bertha went to look for him. Finally, they heard a blood-curdling scream. When they found her, Aunt Bertha was holding on to his ankles, screaming, 'They killed Jimmy! They killed Jimmy! Help me get my son down!' "

A Senate apology, Langhart Cohen said, couldn't erase her family's bitter memories, but it could help improve the nation's image abroad as it pushes for human rights improvements.

"How can we promote democracy," she said, "then say that we are over there to liberate people from dictatorships when we don't even acknowledge what happened here?"

Staff researchers Karl Evanzz and Don Pohlman contributed to this report.