From truth to reconciliation
Students of what newspaper reporters once referred to as “Lynch Law” say the descendants of victims are unlikely to see formal justice done on behalf of their forebears.
No perpetrator is known to have been convicted of murder in America’s more than 5,000 lynching cases. And even though a handful of U.S. senators backed the passage of antilynching laws as early as the 1920s, Congress — repeatedly stymied by Democratic senators from the South — never passed such a bill.
In 2005, the Senate passed a resolution apologizing for its “failure to enact anti-lynching legislation” and expressing its “deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets” to victims’ descendants.
This year, the Department of Justice reopened the case of Emmett Till, the African-American 14-year-old who was shot to death, mutilated and thrown in a river in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly flirted with a white woman.
The woman’s husband and his half-brother were acquitted by an all-white jury but are said to have confessed their guilt to a reporter years later.
Even so, enough time had passed that witnesses had died, evidence had gone cold and interest in the case had waned. Though murder has no statute of limitations, legal experts say homicide charges are rarely filed if no living person can be shown to have been involved.
That leaves a different kind of justice — the kind for which Will Schwarz and other activists are now fighting.
It was three years ago that Schwarz, a white Baltimore County documentary filmmaker, attended a lecture by Stevenson at the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
Stevenson was on tour publicizing “Just Mercy,” his critically acclaimed and bestselling memoir about his work on behalf of young African-Americans he believed were being treated unfairly within Alabama’s criminal justice system.
The argument that Stevenson made connecting those issues to the nation’s lynching history mesmerized Schwarz. Even as a college graduate and history buff, he says, he had never heard or read much on the subject.
“I’m ashamed to admit this, but I was honestly