Anti-Lynching Legislation

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ANTI-LYNCHING LEGISLATION

Because certain white people in the United States chose mob terrorism as a means of interracial social control, 3,445 of the 4,742 lynching deaths reported between 1882 and 1964 were black men and women. Local and state governments might have provided some protection, but Jim Crow laws had stripped African Americans of basic citizenship rights, especially the right to vote. Consequently, white officials felt no political obligation to defend a beleaguered minority or prosecute lynchers.

Often less concerned about black rights than about the harm that violence could do to a state's reputation nationally and to its citizens' respect for the law, forty states from the 1890s to the early 1930s adopted codes to deal with lynching and race riots. Not uniform by any means, some addressed the protection of prisoners once in custody, some held sheriffs liable if a lynching occurred, and some established dependents' rights to sue the town or county for damages or specified grounds for invoking state militia help against an impending mob. Especially in the South, these laws proved largely ineffectual. Officials too often condoned mob action; whites pretended that the victim had not been in police custody, thereby absolving the county and its leaders; coroners' juries compliantly ruled that death had come "at the hands of parties unknown"; and in the 1930s lynchers increasingly utilized small death squads to avoid public detection. Since the states had failed to halt lynching, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched its own crusade for a federal anti-lynching statute.

Founded in 1909, the NAACP gathered evidence to inform the public of racist inequities, lobbied legislators, and initiated litigation in pursuit of liberal reforms. In 1919, the association held a national conference on lynching and published its famous Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889–1918, which was followed by annual supplements into the mid-1940s.

Under James Weldon Johnson's leadership, the NAACP helped to formulate a model anti-lynching bill that Republican Congressman Leonidas Dyer from Missouri sponsored throughout the 1920s. These NAACP-Dyer bills provided fines and imprisonment for local officials who allowed a lynching or failed to prosecute mob members, and they set a fine of up to $10,000 on the county in question. In January 1922 the Dyer bill passed the House of Representatives but died under threat of a lengthy filibuster in the Senate. House passage, nonetheless, indicated the growing strength of black voters in northern and midwestern districts, brought about by the heavy migrations of blacks from the South during the preceding three decades.

With their emphasis on federal remedies, the New Deal and Fair Deal eras seemed a suitable time to renew the drive for a federal anti-lynching law, and the NAACP, then headed by Walter F. White, did so vigorously in the years from 1933 to 1950. The chief House sponsor in the 1930s was Democrat Joseph Gavagan from New York, while Robert F. Wagner, also a New York Democrat, headed the Senate effort. The NAACP mobilized impressive support among ethnic minorities, labor unions, women, liberal churches, and civil rights and civil liberties groups, a coalition that effectively set in motion the mid-century civil rights movement. Although opposed to lynching, the Communist Party-USA distanced itself from the anti-lynching bills because of ideological differences with the NAACP. The Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching also stood apart from the NAACP bills for fear of federal intervention in southern life. Eleanor Roosevelt, however, lent the NAACP her open support and consulted regularly with Walter White about strategies in the Capital. She urged her husband and his White House advisers to back the cause, but the administration gave only tacit encouragement rather than offend southern Democrats who largely controlled both houses of Congress through committee chairmanships. The NAACP bill passed the House in 1937 and in 1940, but the customary alliance of northern conservative Republicans and southern segregationist Democrats stopped its progress in the Senate. They protested that a federal law would violate states rights prerogatives, but they really worried that expansions of federal authority would undermine the economic and social controls that their various supporters had long enjoyed.

NAACP anti-lynching bills suffered the same obstructions after World War II, despite being part of President Harry S. Truman's civil rights packages from 1947 to 1952. Nevertheless, the threat of a federal law had put the South on notice and helped to hasten lynching's decline after the mid-1930s. In the expansive social justice climate of the 1960s, Congress enacted a section of the 1968 Civil Rights Law that established some federal protections against lynching.