It’s taken a great deal of effort by a great many people, but we’re finally closing in on a long-overdue acknowledgement of an unutterably shameful moment in Canadian history. This coming Tuesday, February 28, marks the 122nd anniversary of the day that an American lynch mob rode north across the border at Sumas, about 80 kilometres east of Vancouver, and hanged a 14-year-old Canadian boy, whose name was Louie Sam. On Wednesday, March 1, the Washington state legislature will adopt a resolution to “acknowledge the injustice” surrounding the event. A companion resolution of some sort is expected to be put to the British Columbia legislature.

....Interest in the case was revived last June when the United States adopted a resolution confessing to its shame in having failed, when it mattered most, to enact anti-lynching laws. The Senate resolution apologized to the descendants of the 4,743 people lynched in the U.S. between the 1880s and the 1960s. The one lynching for which the Senate resolution did not atone was the lynching of Louie Sam – believed to be the only documented case of lynching in Canadian history.