WASHINGTON, June 13 (Xinhuanet) -- The US Senate apologized on Monday for its past failures to pass anti-lynching legislation.

    A non-binding resolution, sponsored by Senators Mary Landrieu, a Democrat, and George Allen, a Republican from Virginia, was approved by a voice vote with no objection.

    In the resolution, the Senate "expresses the deepest sympathiesand most solemn regrets ... to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States."

    The House passed anti-lynching legislation three times between 1920 and 1940, but the Senate failed to approve the measures because southern senators filibustered each of them, although seven presidents asked the Congress to end lynching.

    Some 200 lynching victims and their descendants were present towitness the event at the US Capitol, including James Cameron, the only known survivor of a lynching.

    "It's 100-something years too late, but I'm glad they're doing it," said Cameron, 91, who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

    Cameron, a black, was nearly lynched with two other black men for the murder of a white man and the alleged rape of a white woman, when he was a shoeshine boy in 1930.

    An estimated 4,500 to 5,000 Americans were killed by lynching, most of them black men in the South, between 1882 and 1968, according to a report in Monday's edition of USA Today. Enditem