Hundreds protest “lynching” in Texas.  Protesters upset about the dragging death of another Black in east Texas rallied outside the Lamar County courthouse Monday to take a stand on a ruling they considered unjust. In September, a 24-year-old Black man in racially tense Paris, Texas, was hit by a pickup truck driven by two White men and dragged until his body tore to pieces. The gruesome death of Brandon McClelland triggered grim flashbacks of the notorious James Byrd case a couple years ago. Read the rest here.

Oregon university lynches an Obama image. George Fox University in Oregon may be a Christian school, but you’d never know it by the way some of its students behave. On campus Tuesday, somebody lynched a life-sized cardboard dummy of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. George Fox University President Robin Baker said that a custodian found the six-foot cutout of Obama swinging from a tree on campus and removed it - sending a chilling historic flashback through the minds of its African-American students. Between the late-19^th century and mid-20^th century, Blacks were routinely lynched throughout the South and Midwest, often for nothing other than having darker skin. Sometimes successful African Americans were lynched by Whites who were merely jealous of their accomplishments. Obama, a Harvard graduate, Grammy winner, best-selling author and millionaire is the first Black person to land a major-party presidential nomination. The image of Obama was accompanied by a note: “Act Six reject.” A minority scholarship program at the university is called “Act Six.” Baker told The Associated Press that he met with the students in Act Six who are on full scholarship, noting that he had another meeting scheduled for the entire student body this week.

Republicans said they will not support it until an energy bill has been passed

The move to seek justice for Civil Rights Era lynching victims came to a screeching halt Monday as Republican members of the U.S. Senate said they will not support any legislation until they can get a vote on an energy bill. The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act would give the U.S. Justice Department $10 million per year to prosecute those responsible for killing Blacks and supporters of civil rights initiatives. In addition, the bill called for $3.5 to aid local law-enforcement agencies involved in the investigations. The bill was among about three dozen pieces of legislation aimed at helping mentally ill people, homeless youths, stroke victims and child-porn prosecutors. Leading the charge against the measure was Sen. Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, who consistently fights new spending measures. He was joined by 39 colleagues. The 52 votes in favor were eight short of the number needed to force a final vote on the bill bundle. Democrats argue that the Republicans want to keep the money on hand for the war in Iraq. “History will tell whether this is a setback or a setup for ultimate victory of the Till bill,” Alvin Sykes of Kansas City, president of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign and drafter of the bill, told The Clarion Ledger newspaper in Mississippi. “Every justice-seeking American should be calling and e-mailing their U.S. senators, strongly urging the passage of the bill.” The “Till bill” is named after Emmett Till, the Black teen from Chicago who was kidnapped and brutally beaten before being shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1955. Why do you think the bill didn’t pass?

Two Black sharecropper couples died in a notoriously gruesome race murder

Federal and state investigators and lawmakers are hoping that, after 62 years, they can bring to justice the dozen or so men who riddled four Black sharecroppers with bullets and cut the unborn baby from one of the victims in the last recorded mass lynching in America. It was July 26, 1945 when a mob, armed with shotguns, rifles and machine guns, took the foursome to the Moore’s Ford Bridge and shot them hundreds of times. One of the men had been accused of killing a White man two weeks earlier. A Klansman bootlegger bailed the suspect out of jail, and drove him, his wife, her brother and her brother’s wife to the bridge, where they were massacred. This week, officials from the FBI and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation retrieved boxes of evidence from a home in a rural Georgia community of Walton County. “The FBI and GBI had gotten some information that we couldn’t ignore with respect to this case,” GBI spokesman John Bankhead told CNN. For the past several years, Tyrone Brooks, a member of the Georgia state House, has been pressing for justice in this 1946 case. “We just hope and pray they can bring some of these suspects to the bar of justice before they die, because they’re all getting up in age,” said Brooks, the president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials. At the national level, Rep. John Lewis, who represents Georgia in the U.S. House, sponsored a bill that provides $10 million a year over the next decade to investigate lynch cases from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Although a lone Oklahoma senator, Tom Coburn, has been blocking the legislation – he almost never supports measures that require federal dollars – but his recently indicated that he might be willing to allow the legislation to go through.

Church leaders say they will never stop honoring the slain young men

A Mississippi church paused Sunday to remember three civil rights workers who were slain by the Ku Klux Klan 44 years ago. The Mount Zion United Methodist Church in Neshoba County held its annual memorial service for James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were killed in Philadelphia, Miss., on June 21 after arriving there to investigate the firebombing of a Black church. Chaney, a 21-year-old Black man from Meridian, Miss., was a  was a Freedom Movement activist; Goodman, 20, and Schwerner, 24, were both White Jews from New York who had just been trained in how to help Blacks register to vote. “Every year it’s more and more important because of the circumstances back in ‘64 and the three young men losing their lives trying to get the Blacks registered to vote. It’s just important and we try to make sure every year we try to do something to commemorate their lives and just to remember them,” said Jewel McDonald, a member of the Mt. Zion Memorial Committee Member. “We’re hoping that people will have a better sense of unity with people – whether you’re Black, White, or whatever — and that we can all work as a people and get along.” He said Mt. Zion will never stop honoring the three slain civil rights workers. 

Rev. Jackson marches on Chicago-area gun maker

The Rev. Jesse Jackson, who believes that the raging street violence is tied to the seemingly uncontrollable availability of handguns, led scores of protestors in a march against a Chicago-area semi-automatic weapons factory. Jackson’s troops headed to D.S. arms in Lake Barrington, Ill., to stand up against the gun maker, which the civil rights leader said is contributing to the image of Chicago as a war zone. “It does not stand to reason that we’ll fight a war to end weapons of mass destruction from flowing in Iraq and increase the flow of weapons at home,” he said. About two dozen Lake County Sheriff’s deputies looked on as the peaceful rally took place, The Chicago Tribune reports.