The Legacy of Lynching

"I was especially struck by meeting Ida B. Wells's great-grandson and Emmett Till's cousin, because those people were brought alive to me," Greene said. "It took them off the page and made them three-dimensional for me."

Cameron fielded questions from the descendants about how he had survived the rope. "I admire you, Mr. Cameron," a young descendant of Crawford told him. "We learned about you in school."

Cameron told the story about how he was almost murdered. He was only 16 years old when a mob came for him at the jail in Marion, Ind., in 1930. He and two friends, Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, were accused of robbing and killing a white man at a lover's lane. Initial reports said a woman in the car was raped, although the woman denied it.

Smith and Shipp had been severely beaten and hanged by the time Cameron was dragged out of the jail and over to the base of a huge maple tree in the town square near the courthouse. As he prayed for God to forgive his sins and a rope tightened around his neck, a crowd of more than 1,000 men, women and children watched in rapt fascination. When a voice rang out, saying, "Take this boy back. He had nothing to do with any killing or rape," Cameron was spared, but he never forgot the faces that anticipated his death.

"His story is so powerful," Langhart Cohen said. "It is so amazing that his life was spared so he could tell people about what happened to him."

The best records kept on lynchings cover only those that were reported in news accounts, and number them at 4,743 between 1882, when the practice began to increase, and 1968, when it had become infrequent. Most of the victims were black men, and the majority of the killings happened in the South.

Maryland logged 29 lynchings, including two on the old Marlboro bridge in Upper Marlboro, a short walk from where the County Administration Building stands today.

History does not disclose how old Stephen Williams was on the day he died on the bridge, or what he did for a living. It records only that he was viciously attacked by a masked mob for allegedly snatching a white woman, after they had words when he tried to see her husband. After he was beaten and hanged, on Oct. 20, 1894, the mob mutilated Williams's body with bullets, The Washington Post reported at the time.

Many towns had lynching places, and spectators would memorialize the brutality and blood lust by purchasing photographs of the corpses or pieces of the ropes that had snapped the victims' necks.

Schools and businesses closed, trains ran special excursions to lynching sites and newspapers announced the locations, guaranteeing crowds.

A book by Atlanta antiques dealer James Allen, called "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America," contains more than 100 images of lynching victims and the crowds that gathered to witness them.

Although the Senate never passed federal anti-lynching legislation, it did in 1908 make it a violation of U.S. postal regulations to mail postcards depicting lynched corpses, saying that the cards might incite violence, according to a report from the Committee for a Formal Apology, which lobbied for last week's Senate measure. The picture postcards were often sold as souvenirs of lynchings; some were even created as advertisements.