In case you missed it, an article in the Friday, June 17, Daily Mail, entitled "Pierce City apologizes for dark past, refuses to pay for moving remains," was not, it turns out, just a lousy pun, but referred to a brief story about the racial past of the local town of Pierce City, which was driven to its knees by a series of tornadoes recently.

According to the news story, on Aug. 19, 1901, a 23-year-old nameless white woman was murdered, in Pierce City, Mo., and her death was "blamed" on a black man, 32-year-old Will Godley. The following day, about a thousand outraged white citizens of Pierce City took Godley and "another black man," Gene Barrett, from the Pierce City jail to a hotel in town, where the mob intended to hang them both. When the mob got to the hotel, however, they discovered "the pole from which (the two black men) were to hang was too short." So Barrett was taken to the jail in nearby Mount Vernon, and Godley was hanged at a different hotel and left for dead, "his body riddled with bullets."

Worked up to fever pitch, the mob then went looking for the town's other 300 blacks (then fully 10 percent of the town's population), "shooting at them and burning the homes of some."

It's a story all too common in 19th-century Southern small towns, a story that by itself invalidates all claims that the Southern way of life was noble and fine. It was portrayed on the screen some years ago in "To Kill a Mockingbird." Not all towns have an Atticus Finch.

What made this newspaper story newsworthy, after 104 years, was the fact that out of a contemporary black family of 22, only one, a Civil War veteran, stayed in Pierce City when all the others in his family took the next train to nearby Springfield. Why did he alone remain in Pierce City? Well, because he had died three years earlier.

But now, descendants of the Cobb family, Charles and James Brown, of St. Louis, are asking Pierce City for a formal apology for the mob-mindedness that drove their ancestors from their legal home in Pierce City. That's fine and dandy, isn't it? The kicker is that, in addition to the apology, they're asking for funds to dig up their ancestor who stayed buried in Pierce City during the hanging and burning spree, money enough for that, "including a modest headstone."

"It causes the family grief," wrote descendant Charles Brown to Pierce City mayor Mark Peters, "to think of him (the Civil War veteran) alone in a hostile, unrepentant environment, where he and members of his race were hated, maltreated, and where many were run out of town for nothing more than being black.

If you ask, How can a dead man feel hatred and maltreatment from aboveground, don't ask me. The black guy was dead three years before the hanging and burning spree. I can't speak for dead folk. I wonder how he'd react to Brown's case against Pierce City. I think he'd probably laugh himself senseless.

Brown wanted an apology and funds for moving his ancestor from Pierce City to the more genial and welcoming town of Springfield. Well, he got his apology .. . . but not the funds. "The shock and outrage you rightly feel for the events of 1901 are only diminished by the suggestions that somehow, someone can just open a checkbook in 2005 and make things right," wrote mayor Peters in a logically sound but grammatically ailing sentence.

The details of this story appear to be somewhat censored. If the hanging of the local black man is true, and "his body riddled with bullets," then it is also probably true that he was castrated, his body doused in gasoline, and burned, all before a white crowd, gathered for a pot-luck picnic dinner. That was also part of the Southern ritual that Mark Twain savaged in an essay titled, "The United States of Lyncherdom." If you want to read the grisly details, and you have a strong enough stomach, read the black American writer James Baldwin's short story, "Going to meet the Man." I imagine Pierce City isn't the only Southern town with a "dark past."

This newspaper story even has a likely date: Aug. 19, 1901. It was probably a real sizzler of a summer day, hot enough to set a lot of folks' brains to thinking strange thoughts. (North or South, East or West, it's really hot days that make for good riot weather.) And the year 1901 happened to be particularly fruitful of lynchings, even for the South.

Talk is cheap. But the reason the U.S. Senate has declined to apologize for the centuries in which the white man held black people as chattel slaves is probably that a formal apology opens the door for massive black law suits, trillions upon trillions, against white men everywhere in this country. What more, you may ask, can lawyers want?

In one of my last American literature classes at Cottey, I asked the students if blacks ought to seek reparations from whites for the years of chattel slavery they suffered.

Oddly enough, all the white students voted No; it was too complex an issue, and there would be too many unfairnesses. The only black student voted Yes. (When I was in 5th grade, my teacher, an exchange teacher from England, taught us about the white man buying the island of Manhattan from the Indians for $24 worth of beads, then asked each of us what we thought Manhattan was worth today.

God, that I should remember that tiny, worthless tidbit of memory for half a century!)

I should have asked my students how much money it would take to satisfy all parties involved in the slavery issue. But it's not just an academic issue any more.

For the past few years, a select black committee, consisting of the most honored members of the nation's black community, has been at work devising a policy to bring their demands to fruition.

It's a tough issue. How does our country pay for the years of abuse through which we whites forced black people to pass from the 17th century to the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1863?

And should we repay the blacks before we repay the native Americans, who were here long before the blacks? Unless I'm mistaken, Congress has already come to an agreement by which the United States compensates -- or pretends to compensate -- the Japanese internees during World War II, for their lost freedom. But how about the Chinese, who built our railroads for us?

All these questions tend to go through my mind at the most inopportune moments--as when I'm singing "The Star-Spangled Banner."