By Editor and Publisher Staff  Published: May 15, 2006 [here]

CHICAGO In an editorial Sunday, the Waco (Texas) Tribune-Herald apologized for the way a predecessor paper covered the horrific 1916 lynching of a mentally impaired black man.

"(T)he editorial board of the Tribune-Herald wants to denounce what happened," the editorial said. "We regret the role that journalists of that era may have played in either inciting passions or failing to deplore the mob violence. We are descendants of a journalism community that failed to urge calm or call on citizens to respect the legitimate justice system."

The apology came the Community Race Relations Coalition Task Force prepared to mark the 90th anniversary of the lynching with a ceremony Monday morning on the steps of the Waco courthouse. Jesse Washington, then a 17-year-old field hand, was taken from that courthouse by a mob on May 15, 1916 as he was about to be tried on charges he raped and killed his employer's wife.

According to an account quoted in Richard Prince's "Journal-isms" online newsletter on the Maynard Institute Web site, Washington was dragged behind a car, his ears were severed and other pieces of his body cut away. He was doused with kerosene, and his body hung from a tree and burned. The incident became known as the Waco Horror.

However, the Waco Times-Herald, a predecessor to the Tribune-Herald, the day after the lynching referred to it this way: 'Yesterday's exciting occurrence is a closed incident."

J.B. Smith, in an account published in the Tribune-Herald last year, said that the Waco Morning News went even further, "describing the mob in heroic terms."

He quoted the newspaper as reporting: 'Resembling the forefathers who dared anything for their country's sake, the determined band of farmers and neighbors last night declared to the sheriff that they didn't want trouble, but that their blood would not stand for a fiendish brute to trample the chastity and sacredness of life and their women folk."

The Community Race Relations Coalition Task Force has asked McLennan County's government to apologize as well for the lynching and other past race-bias crimes -- something many Tribune-Herald readers apparently do not want to happen.

At 11 a.m. (CDT) Monday, when task force members were marking the exact time Washington was dragged from the courthouse, an unscientific readers poll on the newspapers Web site showed that more than 80% of the approximately 3,600 respondents were opposed to offering an apology.