Feds must also answer for lynchings

by Earl Ofari Hutchinson
-Guest Columnist-

The recent opening in Atlanta of the controversial photo exhibit of lynchings, "Without Sanctuary," dredged up horrid memories of a time when lynch law ruled the South. The exhibit, organizers say, is further proof that the South is finally facing up to a hideous part of its past. From 1882 to 1968, nearly 5,000 persons�most of them Black�were burned, shot and mutilated by White mobs in the South. That number is almost certainly a gross undercount. Many deaths were never reported, and officials never investigated many that were.

But an even more troubling truth is that the Black victims were not merely victims of rampaging White mobs; they were also victims of a racially indifferent, even hostile federal government. Despite decades of intense lobbying by the NAACP during the lynch years, the White House refused to support and Congress refused to pass a federal anti-lynching law. All attorney generals refused to push for indictments against public officials or law enforcement officers complicit in racial murders. The FBI rarely investigated and even more rarely made arrests. Less than one percent of lynch murderers were tried in state courts.

Federal officials claimed that it was the job of the states to prosecute the murderers. Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson reluctantly pushed the FBI to make arrests and the Justice Department to bring indictments in three cases: the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964, Army Major Lemeul Penn�s murder in Georgia in 1964 and the slaying of civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in Alabama in 1965. But these killings had triggered national outrage, and state officials had been defiant in their refusal to take action. When pressed for more prosecutions, federal officials balked.

A shameful example of the government�s see-no-evil, hear-no-evil stance toward racial murders is the 1963 Birmingham church bombing that killed four Black girls. The FBI almost immediately identified the bombers. But when state prosecutors stonewalled the case, the Justice Department flatly refused to bring charges. The government�s inaction was blatant legal evasion.

Two federal statutes gave the Justice Department the power to prosecute public officials and law enforcement officers who committed or conspired with others to commit acts of racial violence. The statutes were enacted by Congress immediately after the Civil War and were aimed at specifically punishing racial attacks against Blacks. Federal officials also could have prosecuted many of the lynch murders under the Lindbergh Act, passed in 1934, which made the interstate transport of kidnapping victims a federal offense.

When local police agencies could not handle interstate crimes such as bank robbery, auto theft and fireworks sales, Congress passed new federal laws and the Justice Department enforced them. Congress and the White House raised no outcry about states� rights, constitutional violations or federal limits of power to curb these abuses.

The South has made much progress in purging the racial demons of its past. State prosecutors in Mississippi convicted Byron de la Beckwith in 1994 for the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers, and former Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers in 1998 for the 1965-firebomb murder of Mississippi NAACP official Vernon Dahmer. And Bobby Frank Cherry, the last of the alleged Birmingham church bombers, is now on trial. Two others have been convicted.

But other cases of racially motivated murders scream for closure. In 1959, Mack Charles Parker was seized from a Mississippi jail by a group of armed white men. Parker was accused of raping a white woman. The FBI had solid evidence that the murderers crossed state lines and that law enforcement officers had conspired with the killers. No state or federal charges were ever brought.

In 1961, a White Mississippi state representative murdered Herbert Lee, anNAACP worker, during a traffic dispute on an open highway. Lee was unarmed. No state or federal charges were ever brought.

In 1965, Jimmy Lee Jackson, a Black church deacon, was gunned down by an Alabama state trooper following a voting-rights march and rally in Marion. No state or federal charges were ever brought.

The Atlanta lynching exhibit highlights the grotesque period in America when Blacks were murdered with the quasi-official approval of Southern state officials, and the federal government turned a racially insensitive blind eye to these crimes. Unfortunately, it will take more than gruesome pictures of Black bodies swinging from trees to force federal officials to admit they were as complicit in those deaths as raging white Southern mobs.

(Earl Hutchinson is a columnist and the author of "The Crisis in Black and Black." He can be contacted at [email protected]. This article was transmitted via the Pacific News Service.)