1916 MURDER OF ABBEVILLE FARMER

WASHINGTON — There can be no justice for the Crawford family.

In 1916, their forebear, Anthony Crawford, a successful black farmer from Abbeville, accused a white buyer of offering an unfairly low price for Crawford’s cotton.

For this, Crawford was beaten, mutilated and hanged by a white mob who repeatedly fired shots into his swinging body.

No one was ever punished.

But on Monday, the U.S. Senate will apologize.

It will offer an apology — an act documented only a handful of times in Senate history — for failing to pass anti-lynching legislation.

Three times, over the course of the 20th century, the U.S. House passed such a bill. Three times, the Senate rejected it. Seven presidents fruitlessly urged the Senate to act.

This year it will, pressed by a group of civil rights leaders, politicians and artists who call themselves “The Committee for A Formal Apology.” The resolution to apologize will be addressed to the nation’s 4,749 documented victims of lynching and their descendants.

One of those descendants, a great-great-granddaughter of Anthony Crawford, will witness the vote from the Senate chamber.

Doria Dee Johnson sits on “The Committee” with comedian Dick Gregory, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, D-Ill.

Johnson, 44, is a saleswoman for a legal supply company who lives in Evanston, Ill. But from her childhood, Abbeville has loomed in her conscience, compelling her to search for meaning in the murder of her great-great-grandfather and to examine the scars it has left upon her family.

In a phone interview from her home, she said she has a question for South Carolina: Why hasn’t it apologized?

“Here’s the irony,” she said. “The United States Senate will apologize, but the city of Abbeville and the county of Abbeville and the state of South Carolina will not.”

HEALING POWER OF AN APOLOGY

Johnson’s question elicited a mix of sometimes reticent and sometimes emotional responses.

• Abbeville’s white mayor, Harold E. McNeill, said the lynching occurred 16 years before he was born, but he is willing to consider an apology from the city — “anything that will make the community more harmonious.”

• Claude Thomas, a black member of the Abbeville County Council, feels “all kinds of anxieties about what took place back then” but had no comment as to whether an apology is in order.

• Ray Gunnells, the white chairman of the County Council, rejected the idea. “I don’t feel the need to apologize for anything they did. I don’t want somebody to apologize for something I did 10 or 15 years down the road.”

• Will Folks, a spokesman for Gov. Mark Sanford, said if the Legislature were to apologize, “that’s obviously a decision the governor would support.”

South Carolina’s two U.S. senators — Republicans Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint, a co-sponsor of the Senate resolution — spoke to the healing powers of an apology but didn’t want to tell local leaders what to do.

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-Columbia, was of two minds.

The former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Clyburn called a Senate and local apology a “no-brainer.” But he added that cautioned apologies can be “just words.”

“If the Senate really wants to apologize,” he said, “let it name the Voting Rights Act after Anthony Crawford and reauthorize it before it expires in 2007” — when some federal oversight of voting laws would end.

THE WOUNDS THAT NEVER HEAL

Crawford was a typical lynching victim — the child of slaves who aspired or achieved too much in the eyes of whites who had exercised total control over blacks.

Records show he was far more successful than most farmers in Abbeville. His farm, confiscated after the lynching, was worth more than $20,000.

His children were forced out of Abbeville, with nothing.

That partly explains, Johnson says, why her family is scattered over the country and why she didn’t know until recently that some branches remained in Abbeville.

Anthony Crawford’s death is part of South Carolina’s past, she said, but also her family’s present.

“Grandpa Crawford’s blood has never dried.”

Reach Markoe at (202) 383-6023 or lmarkoe@krwashington.com