It's hard to say "I am sorry"

For the first time in U.S. history, the Senate offered a formal apology to African Americans for at least one wrong doing, the failure to establish anti-lynching laws. The formal apology, adopted by voice vote, was issued decades after senators blocked anti-lynching bills by a six-week filibuster. Lynching is defined as a violent act, usually racial in nature, that denies a person due process of law and is carried out with the complicity of the local society.

"The Senate failed you and your ancestors and our nation," Senator Mary L. Landrieu of Louisiana, chief Democratic sponsor of the resolution, said at a luncheon. It was attended by 200 family members and descendants of victims, including a 91-year-old man believed to be the only known survivor of an attempted lynching.

He is James Cameron, who in 1930, as a 16-year-old shoeshine boy in Marion, Ind., was accused with two friends of murdering a white man and raping a white woman. His friends were killed. But as Mr. Cameron felt a noose being slipped around his neck, a man in the crowd stepped forward to proclaim Mr. Cameron's innocence. Mr. Cameron came here in a gray suit and a wheelchair, his voice shaky but his memories apparently fresh.

"They took the rope off my neck, those hands that had been so rough and ready to kill or had already killed, they took the rope off of my neck and they allowed me to start walking and stagger back to the jail, which was just a half-block away," Mr. Cameron told a news conference. "When I got back to the jail, the sheriff said, 'I'm going to get you out of here for safekeeping.'" He learned only later that the sheriff was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. "I was saved," Mr. Cameron said, "by a miracle."

There have been 4,742 recorded lynchings in American history [between 1882 and 1968]. Historians suspect that many more went undocumented. Although the House passed anti-lynching legislation three times in the first half of the 20th century, the Senate, controlled by Southern conservatives, repeatedly refused to do so.