From Reconstruction down through the 1930s, white racial antipathy toward African Americans was often manifested in the form of mob violence and lynching, especially in the South, where the majority of lynchings occurred. Existing Jim Crow laws had basically stripped blacks of voting and other civil rights, and white authorities typically felt no compulsion or obligation to arrest and prosecute those committing the murders. Not surprisingly, the strongest and most vocal opposition to racially induced mob violence came from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which in 1919 sponsored the first national conference on lynching and published the noted tract Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918, with annual supplements. The first concerted political action against lynching was introduced in 1922 by Republican congressman Leonidas Dyer of Missouri, who had worked closely with NAACP president James Weldon Johnson to fine and imprison local officials who failed to prosecute those responsible. The
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Dyer Bill passed the House of Representatives but died in the Senate under the threat of a southern filibuster.
The onset of the New Deal stimulated a renewed drive to pass antilynching legislation by Congress. In 1933 the Commission on Interracial Cooperation published a report entitled The Tragedy of Lynching, which dwelt upon the 28 murders that had been committed that year. The following year NAACP president Walter White prevailed upon Democratic senator Joseph Costigan of Colorado to introduce legislation that would have declared lynching a federal crime if state and local authorities failed to act properly within 30 days. However, owing to entrenched opposition from southern senators, the bill never made it out of committee. Similar efforts attempted in 1935, 1936, and 1937 failed to muster the votes necessary to end a filibuster, despite vocal support for the bill mounted by a varied coalition of minorities, labor, women, churches, and civil liberties groups. In 1938 Costigan, backed by a fellow Democrat, Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York, reintroduced antilynching legislation but was stymied by an intense obstructionist campaign by southerners in the Senate. The southern Democrats found allies in the conservative Republicans who, while generally opposed to lynching, were worried about further federal intrusion in state prerogatives.
Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, went on record opposing lynching, neither took an active role in marshaling the political support necessary to outlaw it. The president, in particular, feared offending southern Democrats who controlled Congress through committee chairmanships and upon whom he depended to pass New Deal legislation. Eleanor Roosevelt, for her part, restricted her activities to consulting with the NAACP in the White House and sounding out possible legislative strategies. Not until 1968 did Congress formally enact federal laws outlawing lynching.
Further reading: Jonathan Markovitz, Legacies of Lynching: Racial Violence and Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Robert L. Zangrando, The NAACP Crusade against Lynching, 1909-1950 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980).
—John C. Fredriksen
World History
