SEN. MARY LANDRIEU:
Jazz legend Billie Holiday provided us with some real texture in her story and song, "Strange Fruit," which I will submit to the record. She defied her own record label and produced and published this song on her own, was threatened by her life because she continued to sing it. But like so many things, words can't always describe what's happening, even though speeches were given, words were written, newspapers were published. But something in the way she sang this song, something in the pictures that described the event, must have touched the heart of Americans, because they began to mobilize, and men and women, white and black, people from different backgrounds, came to stand up and begin to speak. And they spoke, Mr. President, with loud voices and with moving speeches and with great marches. But the Senate of the United States, one of the most noble experiments in democracy, continued to pretend to act that this was not happening in America and continued to fail to act.
In March of 1892, three personal friends of Ida B. Wells opened the People's Grocery Company, a store located across the street from a white-owned grocery store that had previously been the only grocer in the area. Angered by the loss of business, a mob gathered to run the new grocers out of town. Forewarned about the attack on their store, the three owners armed themselves for protection, and in the riot that ensued one of the businessmen injured a white man. All three were arrested and jailed. Days later, the mob kidnapped the men from jail and lynched them. This was the case that led Ida B. Wells to begin to speak out against this injustice.
Her great-grandson is with us today. He's told his story through the halls of Congress, to give testimony to her life and to her courage and to her historic efforts. Without the work of this extraordinarily brave journalist, this story could never really have been told in the way it's being told now, today, and talked about here on the Senate floor. To her, we owe a great deal of gratitude. She knew these men personally. She knew that they were businessmen. They were not criminals. She knew that they were successful salespeople, not common thugs. And she wrote and she spoke and she tried to gather pictures to tell a story to a nation that simply refused to believe.
Forty-two years and a thousands of lynchings later is the case of Claude Neal, of Marianna, Florida. After 10 hours of torture, Claude Neal (quote) ?confessed? to the murder of a girl with whom he was allegedly having an affair. For his safety, he was transferred to an Alabama prison. A mob took him from there, they cut off his body parts, they sliced his sides and stomach. And then people would randomly continue to cut off a finger here, a toe there. From time to time, they would tie a noose around him; throw the rope over a tree limb. The mob would keep him there in that position until he almost died, then lower him again, to begin the torment all over. And after several hours, and I guess the crowd exhausted themselves, they just decided to kill him. His body was then dragged by car back to Marianna, and 7,000 people from 11 states were there to see his body in the courthouse of the town square. Pictures were taken and sold for 50 cents apiece.
And one might ask, how do we know all of the grisly details of Claude Neal's death? It's very simple. The newspapers in Florida had given advance notice, and they recorded it, one horrible moment after another. One of the members of the lynch mob proudly relayed all the details that reporters had missed, seeing it in person. Yet, even with the public notice, 7,000 people in attendance and people bragging about the activity, federal authorities were impotent to stop this murder. State authorities seemed to condone it. And the Senate of the United States refused to act.
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