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The limp feet of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith dangle just inches away from the hundreds who came to see the lynchings. One man in the crowd smiles. Another points a stern finger at the two corpses hanging from the tree in a small Indiana town in 1930. There are thousands of such pictures documenting the lynching of more than 4,700 people - three quarters of them black - between 1882 and 1968.
During that time nearly 200 antilynching bills were introduced in Congress over the decades. Three cleared the House between 1920 and 1940, but not one survived the U.S. Senate despite the lobbying of seven presidents. On Monday, the Senate approved a resolution formally apologizing to victims and their descendants for its failure to overcome racial prejudice and enact antilynching legislation when it might have saved lives.
The apology is appropriate and long overdue. But it is not justice. The Senate action provides some level of comfort to the descendents of lynching victims, at the same time reminding white Americans of one of the grimmest chapters in our nation's history.
The brutality inflicted on black Americans in those days was matched only by the lack of contrition among whites. It is only in recent years that the South has made an effort to atone for its violent past. After fading from headlines years ago, some of the civil rights era's most notorious crimes are being reopened and prosecuted.
On the same day the Senate acknowledged its moral failure to act against lynch mobs, jury selection began in a Mississippi courtroom in the trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a reputed Ku Klux Klansman accused of the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, a crime dramatized in the film Mississippi Burning. Earlier this month, investigators exhumed the body of Emmett Till, the black 14-year-old who was kidnapped and beaten to death in Mississippi 50 years ago, in search of DNA evidence that could bring justice to his case.
This era of atonement represents an important step in the country's acknowledgement of its ugly past. But racial prejudice lingers on.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the 20-year-old murder conviction of a black Texas death-row inmate on the ground that racial discrimination tainted jury selection. The decision marked the second time the country's highest court had to step in on behalf of the black inmate, who failed to receive justice in lower courts.
Yes, we have come a long way since the days of lynch mobs. But we still have a way to travel on the road to racial justice and equality.