The Legacy of Lynching

Victims' Descendants Share a Heritage of Anguish

It was like a family reunion, except that the people sharing food and fellowship in a makeshift dining room at the U. S. Capitol were not related.

They were bonded instead by a common history -- a heritage of pain born when their ancestors were beaten, tortured, burned at the stake and hanged.

They were descendants of lynching victims.

"My first reaction, seeing the other descendants, was a little like surprise, because for some reason, I had always thought that my family was in a vacuum, that this was something that had happened to just us," said Betty Greene of Detroit, whose great-uncle Richard Puckett was lynched in Laurens, S.C., in 1913. "To see how many other people and families had been affected, and in all the different ways, was very powerful."

The descendants, some 200 strong, had come to Washington at the invitation of a group of civil rights activists to meet two national lawmakers on a mission to right a wrong perpetrated against Greene's great-uncle and many others decades ago -- the U. S. Senate's refusal, on several occasions, to make lynching a federal offense.

Sens. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and George Allen (R-Va.) welcomed the descendants to the nation's capital last week to witness the passage of a resolution apologizing for the Senate's failure, the first time the body had officially acknowledged an atrocity against African Americans.

The House of Representatives, responding to pleas from civil rights groups such as the NAACP, three times passed such measures. But, each time, the Senate killed the proposed legislation. Powerful southern lawmakers defended the states' rights to mete out justice without federal interference, employing the filibuster to block votes, excerpts from the Congressional Record show.

As part of the historic occasion June 13, civil rights activists and lawmakers held a luncheon for the descendants in a room where senators usually mull policy.

Over tuna, turkey and ham sandwiches served by Capitol Hill staff members, the guests shared details about their murdered loved ones and pondered their family histories.

There was Janet Langhart Cohen of Chevy Chase, elegant former television personality and wife of former Republican U.S. senator and defense secretary William S. Cohen. Langhart Cohen is the third cousin of Jimmy Gillenwaters, 17, who was lynched near Bowling Green, Ky., in 1912. She sat next to the erudite Doria Johnson, 44, of Evanston, Ill., whose great-great-grandfather Anthony P. Crawford was lynched in Abbeville, S.C., at age 51 in 1916. Johnson knows more about the horrors of lynching than do most professors of black history.

There was Dan Duster, a handsome great-grandson of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, whose office was destroyed by fire after she wrote an editorial about black rights. Not far from Duster sat James Cameron, 91, at once strong and frail in a wheelchair, the only known living survivor of a lynching attempt. There was Simeon Wright, 62, the cousin beside whom Emmett Till lay when the mob came to get him in August 1955 in Money, Miss., to beat him beyond recognition and lynch him for whistling at a white store owner's wife.

'The Way Things Were Done'

Meeting each other felt somewhat surreal, some of the descendants said.