Dyer antilynching bill
The Dyer antilynching bill was a significant legislative proposal introduced in the early 20th century aimed at addressing the widespread and brutal practice of lynching, particularly targeting African Americans in the Jim Crow South. Proposed by Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer in 1918, the bill sought to make lynching a federal crime, enforce accountability among law enforcement, and impose significant penalties on counties that failed to prevent such acts of violence. The bill garnered initial support and passed the House of Representatives in 1922, but ultimately faced opposition in the Senate, largely from white Southern Democrats, which prevented its enactment.
Lynching, which involved extrajudicial killings often fueled by accusations against African Americans, served as a means of enforcing racial hierarchy and white supremacy during this period. Historical estimates indicate that thousands of individuals, predominantly black men, were lynched in the United States from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. The Dyer bill, along with the advocacy efforts of organizations like the NAACP, played a crucial role in raising awareness and sparking national debate about racial violence.
Following the introduction of the Dyer bill, lynching rates reportedly declined, suggesting that the bill's consideration may have had a deterrent effect. The bill's legacy influenced subsequent antilynching legislation and highlighted the persistent struggle against racial violence in America.
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Dyer antilynching bill
Identification: The Law: Proposed federal legislation intended to stop lynching in the United States.
Date: Passed by the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922
The Dyer bill focused national debate on the lynching of primarily African Americans at a time when it was prevalent in the Jim Crow South. Later antilynching bills and ongoing efforts by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to combat racist violence were heavily influenced by the Dyer bill.
Lynching is the extrajudicial killing of someone presumed guilty of a criminal offense by a mob. In the United States, death by lynching was usually accomplished through hanging but could also involve burning, shooting, or mutilation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, thousands of people were lynched, and few attempts were made to prosecute the members of lynch mobs.
Although historically, lynching was a form of vigilantism that could be directed at any individual deemed to threaten the life of a community, the lynching of African Americans represented a major component of the effort to ensure white supremacy in the South between the Civil War and World War II. The most common accusations against African American men targeted for lynching were murder and the rape of white women. According to one estimate, about seventy-five people per year on average were lynched in the United States from 1901 through 1920, the overwhelming majority of them black.
Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican congressman from East St. Louis, Missouri, first proposed an antilynching bill to Congress in April 1918 at the urging of James Weldon Johnson, the chief congressional lobbyist of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Although the Dyer bill passed the House of Representatives with the support of President Warren G. Harding in January, 1922, and the Senate Judiciary Committee returned a favorable report on the bill, its passage was blocked in the Senate by white southern Democrats.
Had it become law, the Dyer bill would have made lynching a federal offense punishable by a prison sentence of five years to life, held law officers responsible to protect citizens from lynching, required that district attorneys seek out and prosecute the members of lynch mobs, and levied a $10,000 fine on counties for failing to prevent a lynching.
Impact
According to records kept by Tuskegee University, the high lynching rates of the early twentieth century dropped drastically following congressional consideration of the Dyer bill, with an average of twenty-four deaths per year from 1921 through 1935. That year, Congress took up the Costigan-Wagner bill amid widespread public attention on the issue. From 1936 through 1968, there were no more than eight lynching deaths per year.
Bibliography
Gabbidon, Shaun L. W. E. B. Du Bois on Crime and Justice: Laying the Foundations of Sociological Criminology. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007.
Gabbidon, Shaun L., and Helen Taylor Greene. African American Criminological Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.