RALEIGH, N.C. — The North Carolina Senate apologized yesterday for the Legislature’s role in promoting slavery and Jim Crow laws that denied basic human rights to the state’s black citizens.

Following the lead of lawmakers in Confederate neighbor Virginia, senators unanimously backed a resolution acknowledging its “profound contrition for the official acts that sanctioned and perpetuated the denial of basic human rights and dignity to fellow humans.”

“This is a way to reflect upon this and express our understanding and our regret for official actions of our state,” the bill’s primary sponsor and the Senate majority leader, Tony Rand, a Democrat of Cumberland, said.

Such an apology, Mr. Rand added, will help us “to try to be better children of God and better representatives of all the people of this state.”

A similar resolution is pending in the state House, which adjourned for the Easter holiday weekend yesterday without taking any action. The resolution, co-sponsored by 35 of the Senate’s 50 members, also “called on all citizens to take part in acts of racial reconciliation.” All 46 members of the Senate who were present yesterday voted in favor of the measure.

The resolution recounts a long history of discrimination, from the first slaves in the British colony of “Carolina” in 1669 through the Jim Crow laws that promoted inequality into the mid-1900s.