Reduction in Congressional Representation

As southern states began their systematic disenfranchisement of black voting rights in the 1890s, not all Republicans were willing to sit on the sidelines and watch the party's Civil War and Reconstruction legacy wither away. Beginning in 1899, a small movement sought to confront the disenfranchisement issues head on. If white southerners wished to deny voting rights to black citizens, these Republicans argued, they should accept the consequences of their actions; and those consequences were laid out clearly in the Constitution, specifically in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

Stated simply, southern states that pursued a systematic disenfranchisement campaign against black citizens would find their share of House seats reduced. White southerners could not have it both ways.

The first formal attempt to demand enforcement of Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment was pushed by Senators Marion Butler (P-NC) and Jeter C. Pritchard (R-NC) in late 1899, just as the state of North Carolina was preparing to follow Mississippi (1890), South Carolina (1895), and Louisiana (1898) in amending its constitution to limit blacks' voting rights.Footnote ¹³ Both Butler and Pritchard had been elected on Populist-Republican fusion tickets, relying heavily upon the votes of the state's black residents, and both viewed the current situation through a lens of self interest. Specifically, Butler and Pritchard “saw in the Democratic disenfranchisement efforts a threat to their base of political power.”Footnote ¹⁴

Butler would lay the early groundwork for a Fourteenth Amendment challenge in October 1899, arguing that North Carolina's move toward Jim Crow was unconstitutional. Pritchard followed up in December 1899 by filling out more specific details, arguing that North Carolina's decision to disenfranchise its black citizens was proof that the state did not possess a “republican form of government.”Footnote ¹⁵ This led to angry back-and-forth discussions between Butler, Pritchard, and southern Democratic leaders, mainly Sen. John T. Morgan (D-AL), regarding interpretations of the Constitution. Butler and Pritchard relied upon the text of the Fourteenth Amendment to make their anti-republican case, whereas Morgan and his colleagues clung to the notion that states possessed the authority to determine suffrage requirements, based on the Constitution's general silence on the matter (the Fourteenth Amendment notwithstanding).

After almost four months of off-and-on discussion, Pritchard's resolution was referred to the Committee on Privileges and Elections in late April, 1900. In early June, Sen. William Eaton Chandler (R-NH), chairman of the committee, reported that a majority of the committee favored a weaker form of Pritchard's resolution, and he sought on two occasions to have this weaker resolution considered on the Senate floor. However, each time, unanimous consent was blocked by multiple southern senators, and the committee's resolution was buried on the Senate calendar.Footnote ¹⁶

Although Pritchard and Butler were disappointed by the outcome, a more ominous sign emerged during the disenfranchisement debate. Only one fellow Republican, Chandler, supported Pritchard and Butler on the Senate floor. Every other Republican senator was silent during the debate. A decade after the defeat of the Federal Elections Bill, the “Party of Lincoln” no longer appeared to view the protection of blacks' civil rights as a priority. The political lay-of-the-land, as November and the presidential election of 1900 neared, is nicely summarized by Richard B. Sherman:

Although Republican leaders' dreams of a southern “lily white” movement in presidential elections would prove to be a chimera, their decision to forego active opposition to disenfranchisement would be maintained into the future.

These leadership strategies aside, some individual Republicans in Congress were unwilling to ignore the disenfranchisement issue. Shortly after McKinley's re-election, in the lame-duck session of the 56th Congress (1899–1901), the issue of voting-rights restrictions was raised again, this time in the House. The locus of the debate revolved around new apportionment legislation, which was based on the recently completed twelfth census. Two attempts would be made to stem the tide of disenfranchisement: (a) an investigatory measure by Rep. Marlin E. Olmsted (R-PA) and (b) a punitive measure by Rep. Edgar D. Crumpacker (R-IN). Both dealt with limiting southern representation in the House, based on violations of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Olmsted measure was offered on 3 January 1901, as the House began consideration of the apportionment bill. News reports suggest that Olmsted's resolution—offered as a matter of privilege, to instruct the Committee on the Census to investigate suffrage restrictions/violations in the South and present such findings in a report to Congress (which could then be used, should Congress choose, to restrict representation by state in accordance with Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment)—took the Republican leadership by surprise, and, as a result, created some confusion on the House floor.Footnote ¹⁸ After some order had been restored, the roll call to consider Olmsted's resolution failed 80–83, after which a move to adjourn, offered by Rep. Oscar Underwood (D-AL), passed 78–74.Footnote ¹⁹ Partisan data on these two votes appear in Table 1. Although it seems that the Republicans uniformally opposed the Democrats, the roll-call data tell only part of the story. In fact, twice as many Republicans abstained—“absent and unpaired”—as Democrats (32 to 16).Footnote ²⁰ This indicates that a number of Republicans, including the leadership, did not view representational reduction as a serious goal, especially if it got in the way of a Republican-crafted apportionment plan.

Table 1.

House Roll Calls on Voting Rights Restrictions in the South, 56th Congress

Source: Congressional Record, 56th Congress, 2nd Session, (3 Jan. 1901): 521; (4 Jan. 1901): 553–55.

The next day, 4 January, a turnaround occurred. Rep. Albert Hopkins (R-IL), chairman of the Committee on the Census, hinted at this about-face the evening before when he predicted that the Olmsted measure would pass, even though “he did not think the idea of reducing the representation of the Southern States was practicable.”Footnote ²¹ Thus, once their initial surprise had dissipated, the Republican leadership decided that an effort was needed—even if only a symbolic one—to signal publicly that the party was solidly opposed to the practice of disenfranchisement.Footnote ²² Furthermore, as Hopkins predicted, Olmstead offered his resolution again, and this time the outcome would be different. After an adjournment motion, offered again by Underwood, failed 84–105, a motion to consider passed 104–91, and a previous question motion succeeded 103–98. (See Table 1 for the marginals on these three roll calls.) On each of these votes, an additional thirty Republicans (roughly) participated and supported the pro-civil rights side on the roll call. Finally, a vote to refer the Olmstead measure to the Committee on the Census passed without even a recorded roll call.Footnote ²³

These roll-call successes notwithstanding, the real benefits associated with the resolution were negligible. As a reporter for the Washington Post noted in his coverage of the events surrounding the Olmstead resolution: “it was well understood nothing definite will ever come of it … [although Olmstead] tried to persuade Chairman Hopkins to promise that a special meeting would be called within a week to consider the resolution … it is certain that the new apportionment of Representatives will be made before any such data as the resolution calls for can be collected.”Footnote ²⁴ In short, the Republican leadership was willing to make a symbolic gesture to the nation's black citizenry but would take no meaningful action that would put its legislative policy goals—notably passage of new pro-GOP apportionment legislation—at risk.Footnote ²⁵

Four days later, on 8 January, the apportionment issue was considered on the House floor. As predicted, the Olmstead resolution had no bearing on the debate, as it was safely buried in committee—Chairman Hopkins seeing to this personally. After some wrangling, a GOP-supported apportionment bill passed.Footnote ²⁶ Still, the reduction-in-representation issue was not dead, as Rep. Crumpacker raised the disenfranchisement issue once again, moving to recommit the apportionment bill to committee with instructions to ascertain which states had unconstitutionally abridged the right to vote and determine how much congressional representation (that is, how many House seats) should be reduced as a result. Crumpacker's motion was thus one step beyond Olmstead's, which (as written) had been mainly informational. A contentious debate followed, with a number of southern Democrats denouncing the motion, but only two Republicans—Reps. George White (NC) and Charles Grosvenor (MA)—supporting Crumpacker.Footnote ²⁷ Just as in the Olmsted case, the Republicans were unwilling to put their legislative agenda in jeopardy (and risk undoing the policy victory just achieved on the apportionment issue) to support a measure that would penalize disenfranchisement efforts and thus promote blacks' political rights.

Finally, debate ceased and Crumpacker's motion to recommit was considered via a division vote. It failed 94–136. Rep. James Stewart (R-NJ) demanded the yeas and nays, but only fourteen members seconded, thus falling short of the required minimum. Although individual-level data does not exist on division votes, news reports suggested that “several Republicans, including Messrs. Pearson (NC), Littlefield (ME), Allen (ME), Hill (CT), Jenkins (WI), and Joy (MO) voted with the Democrats against the motion.”Footnote ²⁸

Thus, like the Senate Republicans earlier in the 56th Congress, the House Republicans had largely abandoned black voting rights, outside of strictly symbolic initiatives. Republican party leaders saw few benefits in being responsive to black voters. Given the rise of Jim Crow, the South was considered beyond the party's reach, and too few blacks lived in the North to matter politically. Sporadic attempts to investigate suffrage restrictions and reduce southern representation in Congress would be made in the next few years, but none made any headway.Footnote ²⁹ This was due, in part, to the view of President Theodore Roosevelt, who opposed an activist approach in dealing with southern disenfranchisement and representational reduction more generally.Footnote ³⁰

Anti-Miscegenation in the District of Columbia

After the Democrats returned to power—controlling the presidency and both chambers of Congress during the first six years of President Wilson's administration—the subject of black civil rights reemerged, this time focused on curtailment. That is, efforts were made by Democrats in Congress to enact additional civil rights restrictions. Not content with maintaining the harsh Jim Crow system in the former Confederacy, many Democrats sought to further subjugate the nation's black citizenry by limiting their civil rights in other parts of the nation. The focus during the early Wilson years was on segregating the races in areas of federal jurisdiction—examples included the federal civil service, the military, and public transportation in Washington, DC.Footnote ³¹ The most prominent attempt at segregation, however, occurred in the social domain, specifically on racial intermarriage between blacks and whites, or “miscegenation.” This would be the Democrats' prime focus between 1912 and 1915.

In December 1912, during the lame-duck session of the 62nd Congress (1911–13), Rep. Seaborn Roddenberry (D-GA) gained the House floor and offered a proposal to amend the Constitution of the United States by prohibiting interracial marriage.Footnote ³² Roddenbery's proposal came at a time of racial unrest, as race riots had broken out throughout the country in 1912. This unrest was tied to the athletic success of Jack Johnson, the black boxing champion who recently retained his title against Jim Jeffries, the white former world champion. If Johnson's athletic triumph was not enough for white southerners to stomach, he also pursued a risqué personal life with his many affairs with (and two marriages to) white women. Roddenberry even mentioned Johnson by name in his floor diatribe, laying the blame at the foot of the northern states that allowed intermarriage and thus Johnson's racially subversive behavior.Footnote ³³ Roddenbery, although likely grandstanding, hoped to force southern views on the rest of the nation—or, at a minimum, pressure additional northern states to pass anti-miscegenation legislation. (At the time of Roddenbery's proposal, twenty-nine of the forty-eight states possessed anti-miscegenation laws.) In the end, Roddenbery's proposal went nowhere, as it was referred to the Judiciary Committee and was not reported out.Footnote ³⁴ Moreover, his attempt to push additional northern states to adopt anti-miscegenation laws would prove to be a failure, as only one additional state—Wyoming in 1913—adopted such legislation (though many state legislatures did consider it).

Although Roddenbery's efforts were in vain, the issue of miscegenation emerged again later in the lame-duck session. On 10 February 1913, H. R. 5948, a bill introduced by Rep. Thomas Hardwick (D-GA) that would “prohibit in the District of Columbia the intermarriage of whites with negroes or Mongolians” and make intermarriage a felony (with penalties up to $500 and/or 2 years in prison) was called up and considered on the House floor.Footnote ³⁵ Thus, the Democratic opponents of black civil rights narrowed the scope of their attack; rather than a sweeping constitutional amendment, they pushed a proposal that would ban interracial marriage specifically within the District of Columbia. Unlike Roddenbery's prior proposal, a constitutional amendment would not be necessary to alter policy in this case because Article 1, Section 8, Clause 17 of the Constitution gave Congress explicit jurisdiction to govern on matters involving the District of Columbia.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Hardwick anti-miscegenation bill was passed in “less than five minutes,” with absolutely no debate.Footnote ³⁶ Moreover, a simple voice vote was going to decide the matter, before Rep. James Mann (R-IL) asked for a division, whereupon it was reported that there were 92 votes in favor and 12 votes opposed.Footnote ³⁷ In explaining the outcome and general lack of debate on the bill, a correspondent for the New York Times reported: “Almost every State has a law prohibiting such marriages, and the feeling generally among House members is that the Nation's capital should be in line with the general sentiment of the States on this subject.”Footnote ³⁸ Thus, Republicans in the House, perhaps intimidated by the Democrats' bluster and worried about shifting public opinion and further state-legislative activism in the North, quietly acquiesced and allowed the Democrats to quickly pass their D.C. anti-miscegenation bill. However, in the end, nothing would come of the legislation, as it was referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee and never reported out before the session expired less than a month later.Footnote ³⁹

Just two years later, in the lame-duck session of the 63rd Congress (1913–15), the Democrats would push D.C. anti-miscegenation legislation yet again. This time, the bill (H.R. 1710) was offered by Rep. Frank Clark (D-FL), and it would be even more draconian than the 1913 version with penalties for miscegenation escalating to $5,000 and/or 5 years in prison.Footnote ⁴⁰ Clark's anti-miscegenation bill was considered on 11 January 1915, and, unlike the Hardwick bill two years earlier, elicited a short discussion.Footnote ⁴¹ Clark argued that enactment of his bill “was in the interest of both of the races” and that maintaining racial purity was paramount. This was especially important, as Clark believed “the future of the world is dependent upon the preservation of [the white race's] integrity.”Footnote ⁴² Rep. Mann (R-IL) answered Clark for the Republican side, stating that although he opposed interracial marriage, he also opposed making such marriages a crime. Moreover, Mann articulated what he believed the more basic intent of the anti-miscegenation legislation to be: “The purpose of this law is to further degrade the negro, to make him feel the iron hand of tyranny so long practiced against his race.”Footnote ⁴³ After a few additional brief remarks, the previous question was ordered, which carried 175–119; Mann quickly moved to recommit the legislation to committee, which failed 90–201; and Clark's anti-miscegenation bill was then passed 238–60.Footnote ⁴⁴

Before examining these votes in detail, a brief discussion of the differences in context surrounding the Hardwick and Clark anti-miscegenation bills is warranted. Whereas the Hardwick bill was adopted without debate and via a simple division vote, the Clark bill elicited some sharp debate and necessitated three roll-call votes before an outcome was generated. What explains these contextual differences? There is considerable evidence to suggest that pressure from black citizens—via newspaper editorials along and individual and group initiatives—increased after the passage of the Hardwick bill and ramped up considerably after Clark re-introduced the miscegenation issue. For example, a number of public meetings were scheduled post-Hardwick to ensure that additional segregationist legislation would meet active resistance.Footnote ⁴⁵ Additionally, groups like the Independent Equal Rights League, led by civil rights luminaries like Ida B. Wells, were actively engaged, lobbying Congress generally and individual House Republicans specifically during Clark's anti-miscegenation mission.Footnote ⁴⁶ Thus, black voices had raised the visibility of the issue and, thus, the stakes in Washington, forcing members of both parties to reveal—through public statements and recorded roll-call votes—their preferences to their constituents.

A breakdown of the three roll calls appears in Table 2. All three were cross-regional “party votes”: a majority of northern Democrats joined with a majority (all) southern Democrats against a majority of Republicans. However, some interesting variation appears within the two parties. Roughly a quarter of northern Democrats opposed shutting off debate on H.R. 1710; this opposition largely melted away across the remaining two votes.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although Republicans were nearly unanimous in opposing the initial previous question motion, the party's solidarity crumbled thereafter; on the final-passage roll call, almost half (44.4 percent) of the Republican membership defected and voted in favor of the anti-miscegenation legislation. Republican voting on the final-passage roll call is broken out further in Table 3, based on type of state represented (that is, with or without a state-level anti-miscegenation law). More than half of the Republican votes in favor of the federal anti-miscegenation legislation—21 of 40—came from members who represented states with an anti-miscegenation law on the books. In total, a majority of Republican House members from states with anti-miscegenation laws (21 of 27, or 77.8 percent) voted for the federal legislation, whereas a minority of Republican House members from states without anti-miscegenation laws (19 of 63, or 30.2 percent) supported the measure. Thus, when push came to shove, many Republicans eschewed the party's historical connection to black voters and focused on representing the (anti-miscegenation) interests of the whites who elected them.

Table 2.

House Roll Calls on Anti-Miscegenation Legislation, 63rd Congress

Source: Congressional Record, 63rd Congress, 3rd Session, (11 Jan. 1915): 1366–68.

Table 3.

Republican Breakdown on Final Passage of Anti-Miscegenation Legislation

The following day, 12 January 1915, the Senate received H.R. 1710 from the House and referred it to the (Senate) Committee on the District of Columbia. It was never reported out of committee before the lame-duck session ended. Thus, the House Democrats' actions were for naught. Although a symbolic victory was achieved, a federal anti-miscegenation policy was not produced. The District of Columbia would continue to be a haven for interracial couples in the South who wished to marry. Indeed, Richard and Mildred Loving, the interracial (white-black) couple who would be at the center of the Loving v. Virginia (1967) Supreme Court case that struck down state-level anti-miscegenation laws, were married in the District of Columbia in 1958.

Coda

The nearly three decades after the failure of the Lodge Bill in 1891 witnessed black Americans struggling to have their voices heard and their (remaining) civil rights protected. Neither party in Congress was receptive to their needs; the Republicans, aside from a few individual members, no longer considered them an important or vital electoral constituency, and the Democrats were overtly hostile. In the post-slavery era, these three decades were probably the bleakest for black Americans, as they were truly wandering alone in the “political wilderness.”

Beginning in 1918, however, black Americans' fortunes would take a turn for the better. Their status as an “unimportant electoral constituency” would begin to change, as many southern blacks began migrating to the North after World War I. These new demographic patterns would first make Republicans in Congress take notice, and later, Democrats as well. For the succeeding two decades—from the end of World War I to 1940—civil rights would reemerge on the congressional agenda and would follow the same basic form. That is, the goal of black leaders, and their congressional supporters, would be to pass a federal anti-lynching bill. This would be the litmus test for civil rights success prior to World War II and would serve as the early foundation for the construction of a civil rights coalition.

Initial Success: The Dyer Bill in the House

Increasing black electoral influence and growing violence toward blacks were both important considerations for one politician in particular in 1918: Rep. Leonidas Dyer (R-MO) who sought (with the help of the NAACP) to sponsor the first serious anti-lynching proposal since the Hornblower-Spingarn bill. Dyer represented the twelth congressional district, which comprised a heavily black area of St. Louis; at the time, 28 percent of blacks in Missouri lived in St. Louis, and they were heavily concentrated in Dyer's district.Footnote ⁵⁹ Between 1911, Dyer's inaugural year in Congress, and 1920, approximately 26,000 blacks had relocated to St. Louis, a 58 percent increase over the decade.Footnote ⁶⁰ Dyer's district was also important because it was adjacent to East St. Louis, IL—a city that experienced a threefold increase in its black population from 1900 to 1910Footnote ⁶¹—which was the site of a horrific riot in 1917, where whites unleashed a wave of racial violence that killed over 100 blacks and left several thousand blacks homeless.Footnote ⁶² Following the riot, black “refugees” relocated to Dyer's district.Footnote ⁶³ Dyer's district went from 10.7 percent black to 12 percent black between 1910 and 1920.Footnote ⁶⁴ After a visit to the riot area, Dyer was moved by the plight of blacks victimized by vigilante violence; he subsequently sought to form a committee to investigate the violence and to establish federal power over the riot area.Footnote ⁶⁵ In a very short amount of time, Dyer would become the strongest advocate of a federal anti-lynching program in Congress and the institutional voice for the NAACP.

In early 1918, during the 65th Congress (1917–19), Dyer introduced the first of several anti-lynching bills in the House. This bill (H.R. 11279) cast lynching as a denial of the “equal protection of the laws,” thereby making lynching a federal crime to be prosecuted in federal court, punishable by up to five years in prison.Footnote ⁶⁶ The bill also provided for the punishment of negligent local officials for not acting to stop the crime and for collecting a fee (to be given to the victim's family) from counties where the lynching occurred or where the mob had passed through.Footnote ⁶⁷ A similar bill (H.R. 11354) was introduced by Rep. Merrill Moores (R-IN). It was significant because it included seven sections to prevent lynching, in addition to establishing penalties for the crime. The bill allowed for potential victims to petition for federal protection if they had “reasonable cause” to believe they would not be given equal protection by the state, after which the petitioner would then be taken into custody by federal marshals.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Dyer and Moores bills also indicated that the anti-lynching issue had evolved. These anti-lynching proposals rested not on justifications related to war but on the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, an important change that subjected the bills to difficult constitutional terrain.

Unfortunately for Dyer, southerners controlled key House committees through which any anti-lynching bill would have to travel. The year of Dyer's first bill, the House Judiciary Committee consisted of twelve Democrats, nine of whom were from the South, and only nine Republicans. Not surprisingly, Dyer's bill was buried in committee and never reported out.

This situation was soon altered by the 1920 elections (to the 67th Congress), in which Republicans won majorities in both chambers (299 members in the House, 59 in the Senate) as well as the presidency. Soon thereafter, James Weldon Johnson, the executive secretary of the NAACP and one of the few blacks on the GOP's National Advisory Committee, urged newly elected President Harding to make good on the 1920 platform promise regarding lynching, which stated, “We urge Congress to consider the most effective means to end lynching in this country which continues to be a terrible blot on our American civilization.”Footnote ⁶⁹ President Harding obliged and raised the issue in his first annual message to Congress in 1921, saying: “Congress ought to wipe the stain of barbaric lynching from the banners of a free and orderly, representative democracy.”Footnote ⁷⁰ His statement was followed by three new bills, introduced by Reps. Dyer, Moores, and Frank Dallinger (R-MA) with Dyer's generating the most momentum.

Faced with a sizeable Republican advantage in the House, southern Democrats, with a few allies from the North and West, offered a range of arguments against the Dyer bill. Many focused on blatant opportunism, arguing that Republicans were only proposing anti-lynching legislation in order to secure black votesFootnote ⁷¹ and that this partisan electoral ploy would have the dire effect of encouraging black lawlessness in the South. In particular, they claimed that without the threat of lynching, black “brutes” would not be restrained from attacking and raping white women.Footnote ⁷² These emotional ploys aside, no argument was as crucial to the bill's fate as the constitutionality issue. Led by Rep. Hatton W. Sumners (D-TX), anti-lynching opponents argued that the Dyer bill was a violation of the Constitution, as it infringed on the sovereign power of states to police crime within their borders. Of course, it was not simply states' rights that Southerners were concerned about, if their previous action in other cases of federal intrusion is any guide; one such case was prohibition.Footnote ⁷³ As one expert notes, “What hypocrisy when they sanctified state police power in arguing against the Dyer bill, whose invasion of state jurisdiction was not as great as that effected by the Eighteenth Amendment.”Footnote ⁷⁴ However, congressional supporters, including Dyer himself, might have anticipated the importance of constitutionality, given the fate of the bill's predecessor in 1901, which had been negatively reported by the Judiciary Committee largely on constitutional grounds.

The constitutional argument was particularly important to southern Democrats because if anti-lynching legislation was passed and upheld as constitutional, such a measure would “accustom the nation to federal antilynching jurisdiction;” moreover, by logical extension, this meant that “southerners faced not just a threat to Lynch Law but to their segregationist society which federalism, in theory and in practice, guarded.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Thus, the congressional battle over lynching was seen as determining the future path of civil rights and the viability of federal action.

The constitutional arguments were largely on the side of the anti-lynching opponents, as the Supreme Court had established a powerful doctrine in the Civil Rights Cases (1883) that the Fourteenth Amendment only applied to official state actions. Opponents argued that lynching was an individual action, like murder, and as such should be dealt with at the state level. Federal intrusion would thus be a breach of the Constitution. This rhetorical strategy provided anti-lynching opponents with a unique cover so as not to appear to sanction or celebrate the burning and maiming of black citizens. No matter how much they abhorred the lawlessness of lynching, they disliked sacrificing the supreme law of the land even more, or so the argument went.

Anti-lynching supporters recognized the constitutional minefield and sought to create a solid rationale for federal action. Attorney General Harvey Daugherty argued that the absence of state action to protect lynching victims or prosecute lynchers amounted to the same denial of equal protection as an official state law. If the Court struck down the law, they could propose it as a constitutional amendment.Footnote ⁷⁶

The Dyer bill now had the backing of several strong proponents in the House, including Rep. Martin Madden (R-IL), the chair of the Appropriations Committee, who had gained a reputation for helping blacks. The bill also faced a more favorable House Judiciary Committee, which now included fifteen Republicans and only six Democrats (all of whom were from the South, including the leader of the opponents, Hatton Sumners of Texas). Moreover, Rep. Andrew Volstead (R-MN), a prominent and vocal supporter, was chair of the committee, and Dyer was chair of the subcommittee on lynching. This Republican dominance, however, was marred by two party members who refused to support the bill, C. Frank Reavis (NE) and Ira Hersey (ME), who thought their GOP colleagues were being unduly pressured by black constituents. Hersey refused to be convinced by his fellow Republicans, saying, “We as a party owe the colored people nothing, and for one I refuse to be politically blackmailed.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Hersey was right about the importance of the (increasingly strained) hold of the Republican Party on black votes. The NAACP also knew that black votes could be used as a credible threat and undertook a major campaign urging the bill's passage in the lead-up to the midterm elections. James Weldon Johnson lobbied House members in 1921, warning them that slowing the bill, watering it down with amendments, or abandoning it would be viewed as a “betrayal” of blacks.Footnote ⁷⁸ In addition, twenty-seven state branches of the NAACP sent letters to eighty-seven representatives demanding action on Dyer's bill, and the national NAACP office issued a statement, repeated by the Chicago Defender, that “A Vote Against the Dyer Bill is a Vote for Lynching.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The Crisis magazine also issued a strong warning to its readers: “If your Congressman votes against the Dyer Bill mark him down as your betrayer in the hour of trial and defeat him by every legitimate means when he asks your suffrage next fall. In the same way, reward those who met the tests without flinching.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Similar stories of black Republicans threatening to vote Democrat in places like Ohio, Missouri, and Michigan were routinely reported in the press.Footnote ⁸¹

As Dyer's bill was readied for floor consideration, the Republicans succeeded in limiting debate to ten hours, with five minutes per speaker, through a special resolution introduced by Philip Campbell (R-KS), to the great consternation of southern Democrats who tried unsuccessfully to have the bill recommitted to the Judiciary Committee. Southerners also attempted to leave the House without enough bodies present to proceed—a dilatory tactic known as the “disappearing quorum”—but the Speaker ordered the chamber locked and dispatched the sergeant at arms to locate the missing members and expedite their return. Finally, on 26 January 1922, with a cheering crowd of several hundred black onlookers, the Dyer bill (H.R. 13) was passed 231 to 119.Footnote ⁸² As illustrated in Table 4, the vote was straight party line and sectional. Only 8 Democrats—all northern, except one from the border state of Kentucky—voted for the bill, and 7 of these were from the urban areas of Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and greater New York; 102 Democrats voted against the bill, all from the South, border areas, or California. On the Republican side, one southerner from Texas voted for the bill and only 17 of the 222 GOP members voted against it, including Hersey from Maine.

Table 4.

House Passage of H.R. 13 (Dyer Bill), 67th Congress

Source: Congressional Record, 67th Congress, 2nd Session, (26 Jan. 1922): 1795–96.

One important and heretofore unnoticed (based on our investigation of the literature) point deserves mention here: a bare majority of those northern Democrats who participated on the Dyer bill roll call voted in favor of passage (7 in favor, 6 against).Footnote ⁸³ Although most of these pro-Dyer Northern Democrats were relatively quiet during floor debate, preferring to let Republican leaders advocate for the bill, two did voice their support. Rep. William Bourke Cockran (D-NY) gave a lengthy speech, which was greeted with applause, and refused to give up the floor when his southern colleagues attempted to interrupt. Cockran blamed northern migration of blacks on “their horror of death by lynching.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Calling lynching the “last phase of the race problem,” he went on to defend the constitutionality of the bill, saying, “If the Federal Government can step in to take a mug of wholesome beer from the hand of the workingman, it can step in to take a murderous halter from the hands of the lyncher.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Rep. Anthony Griffin (D-NY) also took the floor in an impassioned speech and went even further than Cockran in depicting the hypocrisy of southerners who would use the Constitution when it satisfied their prejudices but were happy to “surrender their police power” for the Eighteenth Amendment. Though Griffin did not cast a vote on the final roll call, he warned his southern colleagues not to “destroy the Democratic Party in the North,” stating that

Both Cockran and Griffin represented districts that included parts of the Bronx and Manhattan, where a large number of black voters resided. (Both districts were later redistricted to become a seat held by Adam Clayton Powell.)

This small northern Democratic majority in support of the Dyer bill illustrates the early stages of a partisan realignment on the issue of black civil rights; more specifically, this indicates that, as early as 1921, some Democratic politicians in the North began reaching out to black voters in key districts where the black population was beginning to possess electoral clout. This is considerably earlier than most historians document, as the typical accounts suggest that Democratic courting of black voters first began in the mid- to late 1920s. Indeed, those seven northern Democrats who voted for the Dyer bill could be seen as especially prescient, as black electoral mobilization around the Dyer bill—and subsequent reactions to congressional voting on the bill—would actually lead more northern Democrats to realize the importance of black voting power in the North. In Dyer's home state of Missouri, for example, black electoral mobilization—spurred on by urgings from black newspapers—helped defeat Democratic House incumbent J. F. Fulbright (D, 12th District) in 1924 and nearly cost Henry B. Hawes (D, 11th District) his seat as well. Hawes, in particular, was targeted by black leaders, based mainly on his unwillingness to support the Dyer bill.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the end, Hawes won re-election by fewer than 2,000 votes, after winning by over 7,500 two years earlier.Footnote ⁸⁸

Franklin D. Mitchell captures the Democrats' situation in mid-1920s Missouri—and, by extension, other northern states as well—nicely:

A more concerted Democratic effort to reach out to black voters began in 1925–26 in Missouri.Footnote ⁹⁰ Democratic politicians in other northern states, like Indiana and New York, made similar decisions around the same time,Footnote ⁹¹ whereas the national Democratic Party first actively courted northern blacks, as part of a general urban strategy, in Al Smith's bid for the presidency in 1928.Footnote ⁹²

In addition to highlighting the early “reaching out” by northern Democratic politicians (the “supply side”), the politics of the Dyer bill also indicate the new electoral leverage exhibited by black voters in the North (the “demand side”), spurred along by the ambitions of black political leaders. Since Reconstruction, blacks had been loyal members of the Republican Party; by the early 1920s, they demanded action on civil rights policy (as embodied in a federal anti-lynching bill), and they were willing to use their electoral clout to make it happen. This included actively opposing Republicans—and supporting Democrats—if their policy demands were not met. (We discuss this at more length shortly.) More generally, black leaders saw the northern black electorate as being determinative in a host of northern elections, and they reveled in this status as a “pivotal group” throughout the remainder of the 1920s and most of the 1930s before gradually becoming loyal Democrats. In short, this was a period in which the black electorate was not “captured” by a single party, as Paul Frymer argues was the case later in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁹³

Ultimate Failure: The Dyer Bill in the Senate

With the anti-lynching bill through the House and now under consideration in the Senate, Dyer, Johnson, and other supporters expressed confidence in its prospects for passage. According to Martin Madden, President Harding had stated: “If the Senate of the United States passes the Dyer anti-lynching bill, it won't be in the White House three minutes before I'll sign it; and having signed it, I'll enforce it.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Proponents believed the threat of a filibuster was unlikely, and the 1920 elections had given the Republicans a majority of 22 seats in the Senate. However, even with every Republican senator behind the measure—itself not likely—the anti-lynching bill would need votes from five Democratic senators to achieve the necessary two-thirds to invoke cloture and overcome a filibuster. (Still, this was considered possible given that 11 of the 36 Democratic senators were not from the South). However, other problems also existed. For example, while Republicans were the majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee, none represented states with large black constituencies (Connecticut, Rhode Island, Idaho, Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska) and none was actively supportive of the NAACP. Moreover, the subcommittee that would handle the bill was comprised of members from states where blacks were either not a large constituency (Vermont, Rhode Island, and Idaho) or were populous but effectively disenfranchised (North Carolina and Tennessee). More generally, Senate Republicans were less responsive to black interests than their House counterparts, in part because blacks were concentrated in House districts but less influential in statewide elections, and few Republican senators were up for re-election in 1922 anyway.

In fact, Dyer and Johnson would find it difficult to maintain support for the bill in the Senate. One notable example was Henry Cabot Lodge, the majority leader, who was once a friend of black interests (sponsoring the famous Lodge Bill in 1891) but was now a lukewarm supporter and had to be coerced into toeing the party line on the Dyer bill. On the whole, the weak support of northern Republican senators stood in bold contrast to the unwavering and disciplined opposition of southern Democrats, which together sealed the bill's fate.

Among Senate Republicans, many were indifferent to the bill and a few powerful senators were strongly opposed on constitutional grounds. One such senator was William Borah (R-ID) who chaired the five-person subcommittee that would report the bill and affect the timing of Senate action. Borah told Moorfield Storey and James Weldon Johnson that he would not support the anti-lynching bill unless he could be assured of its constitutionality. After several failed attempts by Storey and Johnson in making such a case—a difficult undertaking given that the Supreme Court's reigning doctrine on civil rights did not make their upholding a federal anti-lynching measure likely—Borah remained steadfastly opposed, saying that he “would do anything possible to stop lynching short of violating the Constitution.”Footnote ⁹⁵ After considering the bill, Borah's subcommittee sent a negative report to the full Judiciary Committee. Although there seemed to be a narrow committee majority in favor of the bill, Borah postponed consideration for several months until Henry Cabot Lodge, pressured by the NAACP and other Senate Republicans with (relatively-speaking) large black electorates, forced his hand.Footnote ⁹⁶ Finally, after full consideration in the Judiciary Committee and an 8–6 favorable vote—with Borah joining the Democratic members in opposition—the bill was released. Borah's vote, the subcommittee report, the narrow committee margin, and the fact that some members of the Judiciary Committee reserved the right to change their vote under full Senate consideration signaled to opponents that Republicans were not united in their defense of the bill and that doubts about its constitutionality could be exploited. In this weakened condition, the bill was not brought to the floor for three months after being reported.Footnote ⁹⁷

To keep hope for the anti-lynching bill alive, Moorfield Storey and Walter White, James Weldon Johnson's assistant at the NAACP, would try to take advantage of the approaching 1922 midterms in which one-third of Senators would be up for re-election. Republican leaders' aggressiveness in the struggle for the bill's passage would become a test of their loyalty to black voters. Because bill advocates rightly believed that the lukewarm support of Lodge and other Republicans would evaporate further without a significant electoral incentive, they sought to have it come to a vote before the election cycle had passed. If the bill were not considered until after November, there would be little chance for success. According to Storey:

In this context, the NAACP engaged in a multi-faceted lobbying effort for the legislation.Footnote ⁹⁹ James Weldon Johnson drafted a petition and obtained the signatures of prominent politicians and leaders throughout the country, including 39 mayors, 24 governors, 30 editors, 88 preachers, 2 attorneys general, 47 prominent lawyers and judges, 29 university professors and presidents, and many other influential writers and editors.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This petition, along with newspaper accounts and NAACP reports about lynching, were sent directly to senators' DC offices. The NAACP also reminded the GOP of its platform promise at the annual convention:

Moreover, in June 1922, thousands of blacks marched in Washington, DC, in support of the bill.

Dyer also campaigned for his bill. He recognized Lodge's wavering support, and in an “extraordinary move against a senior member of his own party,” he courted an audience in Massachusetts, recommending they vote against Lodge if he did not support the anti-lynching bill.Footnote ¹⁰² Lodge faced a difficult re-election battle in Massachusetts, which had a relatively sizable black electorate; though only 1.2 percent of the state population was black, over half of all New England blacks resided there and the population had grown since the last census. Other Senate Republicans were in a similar spot as Lodge. Senators Joseph France (R-MD) and Charles Townsend (R-MI) were also up for re-election—France in a state where 17 percent of the population was black, and Townsend in a state that had seen its black population more than triple in size from the 1910 to 1920 census (though blacks were still only 1.6 percent of the population).Footnote ¹⁰³ Sen. William Calder (R-NY) was also up for re-election, and news reports indicated that black Republicans had attacked him for allegedly not supporting the Dyer bill. Calder responded with assurances: “I am quite certain that the colored voters understand my position on questions affecting their race.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Senate Republicans were in a difficult position. They understood that they needed to do something on the anti-lynching bill to deliver on their 1920 platform pledge to halt lynching through federal action. However, they also knew that if the vote on the bill could be stalled until after the November elections, they could avoid black voting power in several important states like Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania. If they could appear to genuinely endorse the Dyer bill amidst southern opposition and obstruction, they could curry favor with blacks at the polls while not creating unnecessary delays on their other legislative priorities, provoking hostility from white constituents, or destroying any possibility of improving the weak position of their party in the South. In the words of one historian who observed this latent motivation: “A constitutional reason for killing the bill or avoiding a vote on it could benefit political careers as well as the Republican party's hope of cracking the Solid South.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Although the bill only had lukewarm support in the Senate, there were several additional reasons for its languishing there. As in the House, there were lingering concerns over the constitutionality of the bill. The institutional rules of the Senate also favored bill opponents who would enjoy unlimited debate unless Republican leaders could marshal the necessary votes for cloture. Southern Democrats in the House, defeated, fully expected their counterparts in the Senate to use all the parliamentary tactics at their disposal to block the bill's passage. Southern Democrats believed that much more dire events would follow if the federal anti-lynching measure passed. As Keith Finley notes, southern Democrats viewed the federal anti-lynching proposal as

Moreover, the responsibility for shepherding the bill on the floor was given not to a senator experienced in overcoming obstructionism but to a political neophyte and unseasoned floor leader, Sen. Samuel Shortridge (R-CA), who was serving in his very first Congress. Shortridge was “a fighter” and had his “heart in the legislation,” according to James Weldon Johnson, and it was hoped these traits would make up for his lack of parliamentary experience.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Shortridge performed his role diligently, but after moving to take up the bill on 27 November 1922, he was quickly interrupted by several senators who wished to have other business considered.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Shortridge and France protested, struggling to maintain order; when Shortridge finally regained the floor, dozens of senators had left the chamber. While a quorum was present at the start of Shortridge's speech, only 27 senators remained once the procedural dust had settled, which meant that his motion would not get consideration.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even Lodge, the majority leader and erstwhile supporter, was absent. Only Howard Sutherland (R-WV) protested and asked members to remain and consider the bill, stating that lynching was a “a blot upon our boasted civilization” that

Despite Sutherland's avowals that the bill was constitutional, national (and not sectional), and necessary to preserve the “fundamental principles of government,” none of the senators responded. As a result, the Senate adjourned and the Dyer bill was pushed to the next session after the election.

The NAACP was deeply disappointed in the disappearance of their Republican allies. Moorfield Storey observed that “so many of the persons supposed to be our active supporters did not take enough interest to remain in their seats when the bill was called.”Footnote ¹¹¹ It was a significant setback for NAACP leaders who publicized their disappointment in the Crisis, listing the names of every senator who did not respond to the quorum call and warning GOP senators that if the bill was not passed in the post-election session, they would consider it as a broken promise to blacks.

When the Senate reconvened in late November 1922, consideration of the Dyer bill began again, and it faced a precarious situation. The November elections had resulted in the loss of some anti-lynching proponents, including Volstead and Ansorge in the House and Sutherland, France, Townsend, and Calder in the Senate. Overall, Republicans lost 8 Senate seats and 74 House seats, reducing the GOP majority from 22 to 6 in the Senate and from 167 to 15 in the House. For a federal anti-lynching bill to be passed, therefore, it had to be brought up for a vote while Republicans still had a large numerical advantage in the few remaining weeks of the 67th Congress (that is, the lame-duck session). In order to pressure the lame-duck Republicans in the Senate to support the Dyer bill, the NAACP ran a page-length advertisement about lynching in nine major newspapers including the New York Times and the Atlanta Constitution. The ad was entitled “The Shame of America” and encouraged constituents to contact their senators with telegrams in support of the anti-lynching legislation. They also unleashed a massive publicity campaign to exert additional pressure. Examples included open letters to the Senate, press releases, and newspaper editorials, among other techniques. Their objective was to prevent the GOP from abandoning the bill. If it failed now, the Dyer bill would have to be reintroduced and passed by the House again in the following (68th) Congress.

The NAACP and anti-lynching proponents faced a determined Senate filibuster led by Senate Minority Leader Oscar Underwood (D-AL), Pat Harrison (D-MS), and Thaddeus Caraway (D-AR). They threatened to halt any Senate business unless the matter was put to rest and repeatedly referred to the anti-lynching measure as a “force” bill.Footnote ¹¹² In recognition of the filibuster, Underwood (who was a critical player in the opposition to representational reduction in 1901) proclaimed:

The Democrats unleashed several parliamentary tactics, including skirting quorums, reading the daily journal ad nauseum, adding amendments to the journal, and introducing procedural motions to delay the proceedings; several newspaper accounts claimed it was the most organized and efficient filibuster since the failed Lodge Bill.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Ultimately, the GOP yielded to the filibuster, as a caucus of Republican senators met in the evening of 2 December 1922 and voted to abandon the Dyer bill;Footnote ¹¹⁵ although debate in the caucus was contentious, only 9 of the over 50 Republicans supported continuing the fight against the filibuster.Footnote ¹¹⁶ The Republican Conference minutes document that only a few days prior (28 November) the caucus had met and decided to keep pressing for passage of the anti-lynching legislation; not one of the Republican senators voted against it.Footnote ¹¹⁷ The fact that, only a few days later, the caucus met and decided to abandon the bill suggests that the Senate Republicans had become wary of its prospects for passage and worn down by the filibuster. Lodge thanked the caucus for being willing to sacrifice the anti-lynching bill so that the Senate could resume its business.

When Senate proceedings resumed on 4 December 1922, Lodge announced that he would not seek any further action on the Dyer bill. In an embarrassing moment, he was pressed by Underwood to promise not to raise the bill again in the future. Lodge responded that although he believed that the bill ought to pass, he also felt that “[t]he bill could not pass, as it would be impossible to change the rules now; and the conference decided that they would not press the bill further” in the expiring session or the following one.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Underwood reminded Lodge that if the Dyer bill came up again, “we would renew the fight.”Footnote ¹¹⁹

Leaders of the NAACP immediately blamed both parties for the failure of the anti-lynching measure, but were more embittered toward Senate Republicans whose non-action and indifference was viewed as a betrayal.Footnote ¹²⁰ The Republicans had a sizeable majority in the Senate, but only five had given speeches to advance the bill—Shortridge, Walter Edge (NJ), Frank Willis (OH), Harry New (IN), and Albert Cummins (IA)—and only nine had supported holding out against the filibuster until March of the next year (the end of the session) if necessary.Footnote ¹²¹ Not one senator stood when Kenneth McKellar (D-TN) asked that any and all lawyers on the Senate floor (aside from Shortridge) rise if they thought the bill was constitutional; Shortridge himself could not answer McKellar's challenge to give the name of another senator who believed the bill was entirely constitutional.Footnote ¹²² Finally, President Harding had failed to actively support the bill in the final moments. The New York Times even suggested that Senate Republicans were relieved by the emergence of the filibuster, because it allowed them to blame southern obstructionism for the defeat of a bill that they did not care much for anyway.Footnote ¹²³

The NAACP Annual Report reprinted communication between NAACP leaders and the secretary to President Harding. The NAACP had telegraphed the president an urgent message to continue support of the bill immediately before it was abandoned, to which Secretary George Christian replied after defeat of the bill:

In a response that did not conceal his anger, James Weldon Johnson wrote back that the feeling among blacks was “one of more than disappointment” and was “a feeling of chagrin and resentment”:

The belief that the Republican Party had sacrificed the lynching fight through sheer disinterest would not go unpunished by the NAACP. Johnson, who to this point had largely concealed his frustration, was now openly chilly to the party; he wrote an “Open Letter to Every Senator of the United States,” wherein he indicated that several lynchings had occurred after the Dyer fiasco and blamed obstructionism and Republicans' legislative impotence for those deaths.Footnote ¹²⁶ The NAACP also aggressively campaigned against several Republicans who had been absent in the Senate on the crucial roll call or had voted against the bill in either chamber, including Senators Joseph Frelinghuysen (NJ) and Joseph McCormick (IL), and Reps. C. Bascom Slemp (VA), E. Wayne Parker (NJ), Caleb R. Layton (DE), Patrick H. Kelley (MI), and W.H. Stafford (WI).Footnote ¹²⁷ All of them ultimately lost. Kelley ran against Charles Townsend for a Senate seat and the NAACP threw their support to Townsend.

The failure of the Dyer bill marked the beginning of black disaffection with the GOP, which would continue throughout the decade.Footnote ¹²⁸ In an article entitled, “Political Effect of the Dyer Bill – Delay in Enacting Anti-Lynching Law Diverted Thousands of Negro Voters,” Ernest Harvier of the New York Times discussed the black disaffection at length:

In addition, several black organizations had sent telegrams to Curtis, Shortridge, Lodge, and Watson, charging that their efforts for the anti-lynching bill were “half-hearted,” to which a defensive Curtis responded: “We did everything that was possible under the rules in an effort to jam through the antilynching bill and we only gave up the fight when we saw that it was useless to keep up the struggle, which was blocking the passage of important legislation of noncontroversial nature.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The Republicans' sincere intentions cannot be known; however, it is clear that black leaders were not convinced that the GOP had labored as intensely as it could have. As a result, black leaders began to reevaluate their ties to the Republican Party, and they also began a search for new allies.

Only a few months after the Dyer bill's defeat, the National Negro Republican Conference met in New Jersey and considered the question of how to exert political pressure to secure black interests (including the Dyer anti-lynching legislation); according to newspaper coverage of the meeting, discussion of blacks “bolting” from the Republican Party was a prominent theme.Footnote ¹³¹ Another group of leading black Republicans from several states convened under the direction of Dr. George Cannon, in charge of the National Colored Republican Conference, which had become upset about the Dyer bill failure.Footnote ¹³² The year after the Dyer bill's defeat, a new group called the Non-Partisan National Association of Colored Voters convened in Chicago with delegates representing 17 states. This new group, as Zangrando notes, was “designed to break black voters from Republican ranks,” and sent messages throughout the country in pursuit of its goal.Footnote ¹³³ One of the messages commended the actions of several Democrats in Indiana, Maryland, and New York who had endorsed the conference's support of anti-lynching legislation. Furthermore, in 1923, the NAACP issued a message to its members recommending political independence and the abandonment of historic party labels; later, it passed a formal resolution against Republican allegiance and support for a third party movement.Footnote ¹³⁴ That same year, black leaders protested President Coolidge's appointment of former Rep. C. Bascom Slemp (R-VA) as his personal secretary on the grounds that Slemp was one of the 17 Republicans to vote against the Dyer bill, calling the appointment a “repudiation” of black Republican voters.Footnote ¹³⁵ The activities of these various group all indicated the same thing: black loyalty to the Republican Party was becoming unhinged.

Coda

The tortured death of the Dyer bill in 1922 would prove to be the last gasp of anti-lynching action for another decade and a half. After defeat of H.R. 13, ten more anti-lynching bills were introduced, including three by Dyer himself, but none generated much momentum.Footnote ¹³⁶ The 1924 and 1928 Republican platforms contained requests for congressional legislation on lynching, and President Coolidge asked Congress for a bill after being elected in 1924, but these were largely pro forma. Although an anti-lynching bill ultimately failed to successfully navigate the Congress, it was one of the only pieces of pro-black legislation introduced during this period.Footnote ¹³⁷

Perhaps the Dyer bill's greatest legacy was in helping to reduce blacks' allegiance to the Republican Party. While the GOP had been the sole sponsors of anti-lynching legislation, the lukewarm support of Republican rank-and-file members and leaders like Lodge during the campaign for the Dyer bill generated resentment among prominent black leaders. This disaffection grew at a time when black political power was on the rise, thanks to the expansion of the black electorate in northern states and large urban centers. The diminished reputation of the GOP among black elites soon trickled down to black voters who, by the 1928 election, had begun to defect in large (and growing) proportions throughout the North.Footnote ¹³⁸ To reiterate an earlier point, by the end of the 1920s, blacks had no alliance and were not “captured” (in Paul Frymer's language).Footnote ¹³⁹ As congressional Democrats reemerged in the North in the 1930s, thanks to FDR's coattails, they would be poised to be the “friendly party” to blacks, a title they could not actively compete for given their small numbers in the 1920s. In fact, the largely party-line votes in the Dyer years would become more divided in the 1930s, as northern Democrats would sponsor and support new anti-lynching legislation, much to the chagrin (and vocal opposition) of the party's southern wing.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ These successors to the Dyer bill would expose a widening sectional rift in the Democratic Party. It is to this later episode that we now turn.

Back on the Agenda: The Anti-Lynching Effort Renewed

Between 1910 and 1960, five million blacks left southern states for northern cities. As Douglas McAdam documents, the North and West saw exponential increases in black population over this half-century, with large numbers of black migrants settling in seven “key northern (or western) industrial states.”Footnote ¹⁴³Table 5 documents the total number of migrants entering these key states. Moreover, both McAdam and Alan Ware identify these states as highly contested and ones that that proved necessary for the construction of winning Electoral College coalitions for both parties during this era.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ The drive to pass anti-lynching legislation was one strategy for winning the loyalty of these new voters.

Table 5.

Black Migration Patterns, pre-World War II

Source: McAdam, Political Process, 80.

Responding to this influx of new voters, Democratic politicians in a number of northern cities began “actively courting the black vote.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Such appeals were commonplace for Republican politicians, and (as noted earlier) a small number of Democratic politicians had begun reaching out to black voters in the 1920s. However, with FDR's landslide election in 1932, the political landscape had changed; the new northern Democratic coalition, which rode into office on FDR's coattails, was significantly more liberal than previous incarnations. Almost overnight, this energetic group of northern New Dealers took ownership of the anti-lynching agenda in Congress. As Figure 2 illustrates, the first piece of anti-lynching legislation introduced by a Democrat in the House occurred in 1934, and by 1937 individual Democrats had introduced 40 anti-lynching bills. Additionally, as Figure 3 demonstrates, members from the states deemed pivotal by McAdam and Ware authored much of the anti-lynching legislation introduced in the 1930s.

Fig. 2.

Anti-Lynching Legislation Bills Introduced by Party, 1918–1940.

Source: Congressional Record, various years.

Fig. 3.

Anti-Lynching Legislation Bills by Author's Home State, 1930–1940.

Source: Statistical Abstract of the United States, various years, for racial composition changes.

The demand for anti-lynching legislation increased as racial violence intensified during the Great Depression years. Although the total number of lynchings had steadily dropped through the 1920s—to as few as 7 in 1929—an uptick occurred in the 1930s, with 28 reported in 1933.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ As a consequence, a number of civil rights organizations pressed Congress for federal legislation to prevent and punish the crime.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ In 1933, the Committee on Interracial Cooperation called attention to the problem of lynching by publishing two tracts, The Tragedy of Lynching and Lynching and the Law, which they distributed to “every Southern editor, library, and college.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In addition, a number of advocacy groups including the Young Women's Christian Association, the Federal Councils of Churches of Christ, the Women's Missionary Council of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Writers' League Against Lynching also made public appeals for federal legislation.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ The support offered by religious organizations proved particularly important. For in a speech to the Federal Councils of the Churches of Christ, President Roosevelt offered his first thoughts on lynching through a denunciation of the practice as a “vile form of collective murder” and the claim that “America … seeks a government of its own that will be sufficiently strong to protect the prisoner and at the same time to crystallize a public opinion so clear that government of all kinds will be compelled to practice a more certain justice.”Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Although Roosevelt famously withheld support for a federal law, legislators would use indirect shows of support like the one above as they fought to pass an anti-lynching bill.

Of course, the most influential advocacy organization pushing for a federal anti-lynching bill in the 1930s was once again the NAACP. Walter White, now executive secretary of the NAACP, spearheaded a public-education campaign, which he believed could “mobilize support within and beyond the black community” that would pressure legislators to pass a federal law.Footnote ¹⁵¹ White also publicly declared that he had asked Sen. Edward P. Costigan (D-CO), a former member of the Progressive Party, to introduce legislation that would enhance federal authority to punish lynching.Footnote ¹⁵² According to T.H. Watkins, the efforts of White and the NAACP to demonstrate widespread support for the measure, when combined with his ideological predispositions, “persuaded” Costigan to offer a bill.Footnote ¹⁵³ Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY), a leader in the early New Deal movement, was brought in as a co-sponsor shortly thereafter.

On 4 January 1934, during the second session of the 73rd Congress, Costigan and Wagner introduced S. 1978, which largely reflected the goals first elucidated by the 1921 Dyer proposal.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ It also became the model used by anti-lynching advocates in both the Senate and House in the proceeding years. The Costigan-Wagner bill empowered the federal government to “invade state jurisdictions” when state or local officials “fail or refuse” to prevent a lynching; created a federal penalty of five years in prison or $5,000 fine for any officer “failing to exercise diligence in preventing or punishing mob violence”; mandated “imprisonment from five years to life for any state officer who affirmatively abets such mob violence” and “any county in which a lynching occurs is to be liable for a $10,000 fine, to be devoted to the victims family;” and gave federal courts “jurisdiction where state instrumentalities give evidence of failure.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ It thus represented an effort to expand federal police power into the individual states, a fact that did not go unnoticed by southern Democrats.

On 20–21 February 1934, the Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings on the bill, taking testimony from a wide range of witnesses including spokespeople from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Young Women's Christian Association, Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, as well as academics, lawyers, and state officials from around the country. Also testifying were Walter White and other representatives from the NAACP. White sought to demonstrate the political support for anti-lynching legislation by highlighting the NAACP's membership numbers—378 branches and 85,000 individual members—and by presenting letters of support from the governors of 12 states.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ He went on to invoke the “long, drawn out filibuster” that had brought down the Dyer bill in 1922 but suggested that “far-reaching and subtle changes” had taken root in the succeeding dozen years that simultaneously increased the importance of the bill and its potential to be passed. Specifically, White cited shifting public opinion in the South on the acceptability of lynching as well as changing views on the appropriate size of the federal government.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ Here he anticipated the appeal to “states rights” that members frequently used to undermine civil rights legislation by arguing that “no ‘state rights’ arguments are ever raised when the states seek financial aid for relief, public works, and other boons for the federal government.”Footnote ¹⁵⁸

On 12 April 1934 the Judiciary Committee favorably reported the Costigan-Wagner bill to the floor on a voice vote.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ At the time, the committee was skewed toward the interests of the South and Midwest; yet, according to Chairman Ashurst (D-AZ), there were only “two or three votes against it.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ By the end of May, however, the Senate still had not considered the bill. With summer and adjournment looming, Costigan took to the floor and—citing the “approximately 40,000,000 American citizens” who voiced support for the measure either directly or indirectly through the spokesmen of supportive organizations—sought to demonstrate the political risks facing those who worked to prevent consideration of his measure.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Walter White echoed this appeal in a New York Times letter to the editor, which highlighted broad public support for the bill and Roosevelt's December speech.Footnote ¹⁶² Still, even with language changes and these direct appeals, southern senators threatened to filibuster and the Democratic leadership refused to take up the bill for full debate. As a consequence, the Senate adjourned in June without considering the measure.Footnote ¹⁶³

Not to be deterred, Costigan and Wagner reintroduced their bill (S. 24) on 4 January 1935, a day after the 74th Congress opened, and on 12 February, they made a fifteen-minute radio address on CBS radio network.Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Two days later, the Senate Judiciary Committee again held hearings to discuss the bill. Walter White appeared with other supporters, including Charles H. Houston, dean of Howard University; newspaperman H.L. Mencken; Reps. Caroline O'Day (D-NY) and Thomas Ford (D-CA); and Sen. Joseph Guffey (D-PA). White used his testimony to demonstrate broad support for the bill, presenting the committee with a petition signed by “327 prominent Americans” that asked President Roosevelt “to make the Costigan-Wagner lynching bill a ‘must pass’ piece of legislation.”Footnote ¹⁶⁵

Although the committee reported the Costigan-Wagner bill to the floor with full consideration scheduled for April, southern senators would not acquiesce. Led by Josiah Bailey (D-NC), Ellison Smith (D-SC), and Tom Connolly (D-TX), a week-long filibuster was instituted. Sen. Bailey even invoked northern General Ulysses Grant when he stated his readiness to “fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.”Footnote ¹⁶⁶ The filibuster effort was strategic, as it prevented consideration of other legislation deemed important to the Democratic majority—specifically a bill to provide cash assistance to veterans. As a consequence, the Majority Leader Joseph Robinson (D-AR) sought to displace the Costigan-Wagner bill by scheduling adjournment votes, which, if passed, would clear the legislative agenda for consideration of other measures. On 26 April 1935, supporters of the bill narrowly defeated this tactic, 33–34. By 1 May, however, the filibuster effort had taken its toll, and a second effort to adjourn passed by a vote of 48–32.Footnote ¹⁶⁷

As a tactic of procedural delay, adjournment votes benefit the filibustering minority, because as “adjournment looms the resolve level required to kill legislation falls considerably” because the time necessary to obstruct is limited by a procedural rule.Footnote ¹⁶⁸ In this way, the threats made by southern members to filibuster all summer likely convinced many members to switch sides and vote for adjournment.Footnote ¹⁶⁹

Nevertheless, as Table 6 demonstrates, the effort to displace the Costigan-Wagner bill could not have succeeded without the support of northern Democrats who, up to that point, had fought to ensure full consideration of the bill. Although no single account can explain the rationale behind each member's decision to switch, The New York Times reported that with Sen. William Borah's (R-ID) decision to support adjournment, other marginal members also switched their votes.Footnote ¹⁷⁰ Despite his opposition to the underlying bill, Borah had previously supported full consideration of the measure. As the filibuster proceeded, however, he had come to believe that the bill “would never be brought to a final vote” so it was necessary to “consider other matters.”Footnote ¹⁷¹ As a result, advocates of the Costigan-Wagner bill had no choice but to wait and reintroduce it in the next session.

Table 6.

Senate Adjournment Roll Calls during Consideration of Walker-Costigan Bill, 74th Congress

Source: Congressional Record, 74th Congress, 1st Session, (26 Apr. 1935): 6469; (1 May 1935): 6687.

On 3 January 1935, Rep. Joseph Gavagan (D-NY) followed the lead of Senators Costigan and Wagner by introducing similar anti-lynching legislation in the House.Footnote ¹⁷² Gavagan represented a district that included Harlem and had won his seat in 1929 against Hubert Delaney, “a black lawyer and future NAACP Board member.”Footnote ¹⁷³ Gavagan's re-election interests were thus bound up with support from the black community. Indeed, as NAACP member Roy Wilkins recounts in his autobiography, Gavagan emerged as one of the “main allies” of the NAACP within Congress.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ Accordingly, he worked with White and the NAACP to push for federal anti-lynching legislation. Gavagan was not the lone supporter of a federal ban, however, as House members from New York, Kansas, California, Indiana, Illinois, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Ohio, New Jersey, and Minnesota—states that saw the largest influx of black migrants between 1910 and 1940—introduced nineteen additional pieces of anti-lynching legislation in 1935 alone. Thus, like Gavagan, these members realized their re-election interests were tied to black votes.

As the debate over anti-lynching legislation began in the House, members in both parties acknowledged the shifting partisan allegiance of black voters. In 1936, Rep. Arthur Mitchell (D-IL), the only black member of the House, took to the floor and called for “the early passage of a bill which will make … [lynching] punishable by a Federal law enacted by Congress.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ In the same speech, however, he also declared that “for more than 50 years my people have been almost solidly registered in the Republican Party. It is only during the past 4 or 5 years that Negroes have found that the Democratic Party is a safe place to live and vote.”Footnote ¹⁷⁶ He went on to argue that the Republican Party had “abused the Negroes more than it [had] abused the country” and that in the 1936 election, black voters would “give the Democratic Party and the great President … the largest vote that any Negro group has ever given a President of the United States.”Footnote ¹⁷⁷

This speech sparked a defensive response from Rep. Albert Engel (R-MI) who, in a speech of his own, challenged Mitchell's claims by recounting the history of Democrat-sponsored oppression of blacks.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ He also pointed out that

With his response to Mitchell, Rep. Engel gave voice to Republican concerns over the shifting partisan allegiance of black voters. As a representative of the state that received the fifth largest number of black migrants, Engel was intimately aware of the political ramifications of a wholesale black party switch. Indeed, in his re-election campaign in 1936, Engel defeated his Democratic Party opponent by a slim 580 votes out of 81,085 votes cast, while in 1934, he had won by 2,709 votes out of 63,940 votes cast.Footnote ¹⁷⁹ This was a lesson that was not lost on other members.

Despite the back-and-forth over who best represented black interests, Engel's observation about the Democrats being responsible for blocking anti-lynching legislation rang true, as the Gavagan bill was bottled up in the Judiciary Committee due to the opposition of its Chairman, Rep. Hatton Sumners (D-TX).Footnote ¹⁸⁰ Sumners had a long history of opposing anti-lynching measures, going back to the Dyer proposal in the early 1920s. More recently, in the 1934 Senate hearings on the Costigan-Wagner bill, Sumners appeared as the only witness testifying in opposition to the bill, as he rehashed states' rights arguments and attempted to make the case that federal legislation would undermine state-level efforts to curb lynching.Footnote ¹⁸¹ Now, Sumners would strike yet again, using his committee influence to stall legislative action on the Gavagan measure for the remainder of the 74th Congress.

Stymied in the Senate: The Pivotal Anti-Lynching Debate of 1937–1938

All was not lost, however, for the anti-lynching forces. While Sumners was operating as a procedural roadblock, Walter White continued to cultivate support by using the anti-lynching battle as a fundraising tool and by getting members to publicly declare their support for the bill.Footnote ¹⁸² This effort proved to be critical as Gavagan reintroduced his bill (H.R. 1507) in 1937, during the 75th Congress. He also took steps to circumvent opponents on the Judiciary and Rules Committees by filing a discharge petition to release his bill from both committees.Footnote ¹⁸³ On 29 March 1937, he filed the petition with the signatures of 218 House members—cultivated in part thanks to White's efforts—and on 12 April 1937, the House took up consideration of H.R. 1507. At the same time, the lynching of two blacks in Mississippi focused the nation's attention on the brutality of this crime. White and Gavagan both used these murders to highlight the importance of federal legislation, and on 15 April 1937, the House passed Gavagan's bill by a vote of 277–120.Footnote ¹⁸⁴

This vote is important because it represented the first Democrat-sponsored anti-lynching bill to pass the House. The roll-call data appear in Table 7 and illustrate a sentiment expressed by one member who noted that “not in fifteen years … had there been such a display of sectional feeling,”Footnote ¹⁸⁵ as northern Democrats and Republicans voted overwhelmingly against southern Democrats. Also interesting is that this vote came after Chairman Sumners sought to undermine Gavagan's legislation by bringing to the floor a weaker bill, authored by Arthur Mitchell. Sumners later admitted to Walter White that “quite frankly … he had not believed that … [the NAACP] would have the nerve to oppose passage of a bill introduced by the one Negro member of Congress.”Footnote ¹⁸⁶ The NAACP did, however, oppose the Mitchell bill because

As the roll-call data in Table 7 illustrate, the Mitchell bill split the Democratic Party, with northerners supporting it and southerners opposing it, whereas the Republicans demonstrated near uniform opposition to the “compromise” measure. Here we see strong support for strong anti-lynching legislation among House Republicans.

Table 7.

House Roll Calls on Gavagan Bill (H.R. 1507) and Mitchell Compromise Bill (H.R. 2251), 75th Congress

Source: Congressional Record, 75th Congress, 1st Session, (15 April 1937): 3563–64; (7 April 1937): 3253.

While Gavagan's measure became the primary vehicle through which the anti-lynching effort would operate, it is important to remember that in 1937, individual House members introduced fifty-eight pieces of anti-lynching legislation (see Figure 2). Further, Democrats authored a vast majority of these bills, thus demonstrating their increased willingness to embrace ameliorative civil rights policy. This was due in large part to the new constituency demands placed on these members by black voters. For, as Engel's re-election demonstrated, those House members from states facing an influx of black residents could not afford to rely on their traditional re-election coalitions. Nancy Weiss provides a more systematic analysis of the new political dynamics facing members like Engel by reporting the dramatic increase in support for Democratic candidates in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee between 1932 and 1936.Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Additionally, contemporaneous accounts in black newspapers highlighted the increasing political influence of black voters.Footnote ¹⁸⁹

The increasing political influence of black voters also did not go unnoticed by opponents of the bill. Specifically, southern Democrats couched their opposition as a defensive move against northern members who aimed to use black voters as a tool to supplant the southern coalition. For example, Rep. Rankin (D-MS) argued that Gavagan's bill represented a “demagogic aspersion on the south” and that it was designed to “make Harlem safe for Tammany,” whereas Rep. Sumners (D-TX) argued that the bill undermined the “70 year effort” to stop lynchings in the South.Footnote ¹⁹⁰ Other southern Democrats classified the bill as “the collection of a bill for services rendered,” as northern Democrats sought to repay a debt they owed to blacks for their support in the 1936 elections.Footnote ¹⁹¹

With House approval of the Gavagan bill, the scene shifted to the Senate. In June 1937, the Senate Judiciary Committee successfully reported the bill after a 12–3 vote, with only Senators Borah (R-ID), Pittman (D-NV), and Connally (D-TX) voting in opposition. Still, with debate scheduled for August, Sen. Wagner again found himself fighting to ensure that it would be considered before adjournment.Footnote ¹⁹² In August, as the Senate began debate on the District of Columbia Airport bill, after which the chamber would begin an “orderly adjournment free of controversy,” Wagner secured the floor and called for consideration of the anti-lynching bill.Footnote ¹⁹³ Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley (D-KY) immediately called for adjournment, but anti-lynching advocates prevented the measure from passing. Intraparty squabbling then broke out, threatening further legislative action and the previously hoped-for “orderly adjournment.” Wagner then worked with Barkley to postpone debate and have the Senate begin consideration during a special session called for November, whereupon the anti-lynching bill would be made a special order of business.Footnote ¹⁹⁴ Upon return, however, southern members began a six-week filibuster, sustained by a coalition of southern Democrats and Republicans. Republican cooperation in this obstruction effort, combined with increasing northern Democratic support for anti-lynching proposals, is illustrative of the civil rights initiated party switch.

The first cloture vote, held on 27 January 1938, failed 37–51 along sectional and party lines with every southern Democrat and all but 1 Republican opposing cloture.Footnote ¹⁹⁵ A second cloture vote failed 42–46 on 16 February 1938, with 1 Republican and 3 Democrats switching sides to support it.Footnote ¹⁹⁶ Support for cloture came almost exclusively from northern Democrats, reflecting the new political dynamic in the nation. These cloture votes, details of which appear in Table 8, are also important because they demonstrate a dramatic reversal in Republican Party positioning on the anti-lynching issue. In its reporting on the failed cloture votes, the Chicago Tribune noted that with Republican opposition to cloture “the historic roles of the Republican and Democratic parties were reversed” because for the first time since the end of the Civil War, the Republican Party opposed federal anti-lynching legislation.Footnote ¹⁹⁷

Table 8.

Senate Cloture Votes on Gavagan Bill (H.R. 1507), 75th Congress

Source: Congressional Record, 75th Congress, 1st Session, (27 Jan. 1938): 1166; (16 Feb. 1938): 2007.

The rhetoric used by southern Democrats in the Senate during the filibuster echoed the House debate insofar as those opposing the bill railed against the political influence of black voters within the Democratic Party. Sen. Byrnes (D-SC) warned that if Walter White of the NAACP could “order” this bill to pass, “what legislation will he next demand of Congress and the United States?”Footnote ¹⁹⁸ Sen. Carter Glass (D-VA) argued that the bill was “merely for the purpose of aiding Negrophilists to gain Negro votes in doubtful states,”Footnote ¹⁹⁹ and Sen. Theodore Bilbo (D-MS) asserted that “we are now confronted by … rising generations of discontented and trouble-making hybrids, mulattos, quadroons, and octroons, seeking the elective franchise and conniving with deluded whites, negrophilists, and miscegationists, for the balance of power in determining political issues.”Footnote ²⁰⁰

Republican Minority Leader Charles McNary (R-OR) couched his opposition to the measure in different terms, claiming that the effort to invoke cloture amounted to the imposition of a “gag rule” on the minority party.Footnote ²⁰¹ The right to uninterrupted debate, he argued, represented the “last barrier to tyranny.”Footnote ²⁰² He also made clear that his party's opposition to cloture did not indicate opposition to the underlying bill. Indeed, he argued that Republicans supported the anti-lynching measure but were unwilling to relinquish their minority rights to support it.Footnote ²⁰³

McNary used floor speeches to disclaim any GOP responsibility for the sustained filibuster—despite the party's near-uniform votes against cloture—while also signaling support for the underlying bill. In a January 1938 floor speech, McNary argued that “the entire Republican membership of the Senate, save two, sincerely desire to see the antilynching [sic] bill passed” but that its fate was sealed by the “timidity … shown in pushing it forward.”Footnote ²⁰⁴ In February, he again sought to excuse Republican opposition to cloture by arguing that “if all the Republicans who refused to vote for cloture had voted for it,” it would have still lacked the votes necessary to stop debate. “Under what reasoning” he went on, “can a little minority of 15 or 16 Republicans be blamed for not controlling a situation when there are 80 Democratic Senators?”Footnote ²⁰⁵ In this speech he also took aim at President Roosevelt, arguing that “if the President wanted this bill passed he could easily have sent word to that effect up to members of the Senate, and the bill would have been passed a few days after it came before the Senate.”Footnote ²⁰⁶ This was a point not lost on black leaders. Indeed, as Walter White recounts in his autobiography, upon being pushed to publicly support anti-lynching legislation, President Roosevelt cited southern opposition to the measure: “the Southerners, by reason of the seniority rule in Congress are chairmen or occupy strategic places on most of the Senate and House committees. If I come out for the anti-lynching bill now, they will block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing. I just can't take that chance.”Footnote ²⁰⁷

Even with Roosevelt's acknowledgment that the Democratic Party had itself to blame for the filibuster, McNary's effort to lead the Republican Party in simultaneously aiding Southern filibusterers and appealing to black voters did not meet with success in widely read black news outlets. The Atlanta Daily World argued that most Republican senators voted against cloture “in order to further embarrass their political opponents and prevent passage of legislation their party was never able to enact.”Footnote ²⁰⁸ The Philadelphia Tribune reprinted part of a letter written by James Weldon Johnson to John D. Hamilton, chairman of the National Republican Committee, in which Johnson stated that the Republican decision to place a

Similarly, the Pittsburgh Courier presented Republican opposition to cloture as representative of an effort to “get even with the Negro” for his increasing affiliation with the Democrats.Footnote ²¹⁰

Thus, by 1938, the Democratic Party's sustained effort to pass anti-lynching legislation had helped them win the political loyalty of black voters throughout the North.Footnote ²¹¹ As the aforementioned newspaper reports suggest, black voters proved willing to excuse the Democrats' sectional conflicts even as they condemned the Republican Party's political maneuvering.

The mainstream press also presented Republican opposition to cloture as a political strategy designed to allow the party to nod toward black voters while siding with the filibusterers, thus bringing the Senate to a halt. A full-page spread in the Washington Post presented the filibuster debate in strategic terms, arguing that “it would profit the Republican Party nothing if a Democratic Congress passed the anti-lynching bill. But it would profit them much in their fight to regain colored losses if they could demonstrate their loyalty to the bill and yet have it laid aside by a Democratic Congress.” The article goes on to make the point that

Sen. George Norris (I-NE) saw in these rifts the potential for “open wounds” that would place FDR's entire legislative program at risk. Here, therefore, we see potential evidence for Keith Finley's claim that Republican opposition to this legislation represented the emergence of a “conservative coalition born [sic] of political necessity.”Footnote ²¹³ Indeed, reports that the successful filibuster had “strengthened anti-New Deal senators in the South and embarrassed New Dealers from Southern states” suggest that Republican opposition to cloture may have served as a formative moment for the coalition that would emerge to oppose future New Deal legislation.Footnote ²¹⁴

The Decade's Final Push

Despite the success of yet another filibuster, anti-lynching advocates did not give up. On 3 January 1939, the opening day of the 76th Congress, Rep. Gavagan once again introduced an anti-lynching bill (H.R. 801) that had the backing of the NAACP.Footnote ²¹⁵ (Overall, 22 anti-lynching bills were introduced in 1939, during the first session of the 76th Congress; see Figure 2). As with his previous effort, Gavagan would successfully use the discharge petition to force his bill out of the Judiciary Committee and onto the floor for consideration. The NAACP aided in this effort by sending letters to 326 representatives, asking them to support the discharge motion.Footnote ²¹⁶ Still, before Gavagan's petition could garner the necessary 218 signatures, Rep. Hamilton Fish (R-NY) submitted his own discharge motion that split supporters of the underlying bill.Footnote ²¹⁷ On 18 July 1939, Fish introduced a letter into the Congressional Record requesting signatures from fellow Republicans and outlining a dual purpose for pursuing a discharge motion. In July, the House had passed legislation forbidding President Roosevelt from sending munitions to Europe. FDR responded to this legislation by calling on the Senate to reverse the House's action even if it meant continuing the legislative session until September.Footnote ²¹⁸ Angered by Roosevelt's request, Fish declared in his letter that

He went on in a “sardonic vain” to argue that passing the bill would give the Senate “plenty to talk about.”Footnote ²²⁰ In this way, therefore, the anti-lynching bill served a dual partisan purpose: it was beneficial for those Republicans like Fish who represented states with large black populations, and it could be used as a tactic for undermining FDR's agenda. Despite this wrangling, by 28 July 1939, Gavagan and Fish had worked out a compromise, and the bill was discharged from the House Judiciary Committee.Footnote ²²¹

Debate over the anti-lynching measure did not begin in the House until January 1940, but when it did, the political implications of the bill took center stage. For on 9 January 1940, Rep. Arthur Mitchell (D-IL) gained the floor and once again launched an attack on the Republican Party for using the anti-lynching bill as a tool to manipulate black voters. Specifically, he accused Republicans of “trying to buy back the Negro vote” by supporting Gavagan's measure. When Rep. Fish responded by asking Mitchell if “the Negro vote is for sale,” Mitchell responded by claiming that Republicans “had been very busy during the last 3 or 4 months trying to find some approach by which they can bring the Negro vote back to their party” but that the day had come when Republicans “cannot fool the Negro” like they “used to.”Footnote ²²² This claim, bolstered by Fish's decision to use the anti-lynching bill as a tool to undermine FDR, suggests that Republicans by 1940 were beginning to give up on a sincere outreach effort to blacks. Indeed, as Robert Zangrando notes, by the end of the 1930s, reports emerged suggesting that leaders in the Republican Party had “decided against any further efforts to woo black voters … [and to] make a bid instead for white Southerners.”Footnote ²²³

Despite the partisan battles between House Democrats and Republicans, Gavagan's bill passed by a vote of 252–131 on 10 January 1940, with the same party and geographic splits that characterized previous roll calls on this bill (see Table 9).Footnote ²²⁴ The bill then moved to the Senate where the Judiciary Committee held yet another round of hearings on 6–7 February and 5, 12, and 13 March to discuss it. At these hearings, members heard testimony in support of the bill from Arther Raper, field secretary of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, as well as from citizen supporters and from Walter White. White once again tried to make the case for a federal law by arguing that the states could not be relied upon to punish lynching. Recognizing the precarious international position facing the U.S., he also highlighted how those hostile to American interests in Japan and Europe were using lynching as a propaganda tool.Footnote ²²⁵ After a series of tough questions from Sen. Thomas Connally (D-TX), the Committee once again voted to send the bill to the floor for consideration by the full Senate.Footnote ²²⁶

Table 9.

House Passage of Gavagan Bill (H.R. 801), 76th Congress

Source: Congressional Record, 76th Congress, 3rd Session, (10 Jan. 1940): 253–54.

Despite the Judiciary Committee's favorable vote and a series of communications between the NAACP and Majority Leader Alben Barkley regarding the association's hope that the bill would be brought up for consideration, H.R. 801 languished in the Senate. On three different occasions between April and September, it was “passed over” despite being next on the agenda,Footnote ²²⁷ as Barkley conceded to pressure from those who threatened to tie up the Senate if he moved to schedule the bill. More specifically, southern Democrats threatened that any effort to debate the bill would “waste about half of the time of this session,” and based on the history of Republican support for such actions, they knew that a filibuster would successfully bring all other Senate business to a halt.Footnote ²²⁸ Even newspapers editorialized that “to avoid another filibuster and serious disruption of their legislative program,” Senate leaders should keep the bill off the agenda.Footnote ²²⁹ By October, with the NAACP continuing to call for a vote, Barkley took the floor and declared (like Lodge had in the Dyer episode) that “in the midst of our international situation, our defense program, and the condition in which the world and our country find themselves, it is impractical at this time to make a futile effort to obtain a vote on the bill when it is known in advance that a vote cannot be had.”Footnote ²³⁰ With this decision, Barkley brought to a close a continuous, decade-long effort to pass federal anti-lynching law.

Coda

The causes and consequences of the successive debates over anti-lynching legislation suggest that by tracking the effort to pass federal anti-lynching legislation, we can also follow the transformation of black partisan affiliation and observe the growing influence of black voters. As the decade opened, blacks remained loyal to the Republican Party and its Civil War legacy. By the end of the decade, however, Democrats in both the House and Senate had worked with the NAACP to pass federal anti-lynching legislation. At the same time, black migration to northern cities gave these citizens newfound political influence, which Democrats sought to win over by demonstrating a willingness to push for civil rights. As a consequence, Republicans proved willing to sacrifice these voters and instead align with southern Democrats in an effort to oppose New Deal legislation. In this way, we see that the civil rights coalition that would emerge in the 1960s was not forged because of World War II or New Deal economic policies alone, but was instead generated far earlier by congressional entrepreneurs who used anti-lynching legislation to break the historic alliance between blacks and the Republican Party and win the support of this increasingly important constituency.