This Day in Republican History 1/26/06

January 26, 1922 House passes bill authored by U.S. Rep. Leonidas Dyer (R-MO) making lynching a federal crime; Senate Democrats block it with filibuster African-Americans suffered grievously under lynch law. With the close of Reconstruction in the late 1870s, southern Democrats were determined to end northern and black participation in the region's affairs. After emancipation, despite the efforts of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments and federal Reconstruction legislation, white Democrats sought ways, legal and extralegal, to assert a white supremacy so extreme as to justify meting out ritual death to black persons without any formal legal process. The rise of lynching as a specific race ritual of terror coincided with the systematic passage of state laws disenfranchising black voters and decreeing separate but equal civil and social facilities. This Jim Crow way of life, law, and custom was given implicit national endorsement by the Supreme Court in its 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" decision. Republican, George Henry White, the last former slave to serve in Congress and the only African American in the House of Representatives, proposed a bill in January, 1901 that would have made lynching of American citizens a federal crime. He argued that any person participating actively in or acting as an accessory in a lynching should be convicted of treason. White pointed out that lynching was being used by white mobs in the Deep South to terrorize African Americans. He illustrated this by showing that of the 109 people lynched in 1899, 87 were African Americans. Despite White's passionate plea, the bill was easily defeated. The NAACP hoped that the election of FDR in 1932 would bring an end to lynching. In 1935 attempts were made to persuade Roosevelt to support a bill that would punish sheriffs who failed to protect their prisoners from lynch mobs. He argued that the white voters in the South would never forgive him if he supported the bill and he would therefore lose the next election. Even LBJ once voted against a national anti-lynch law. In other words, the Democrats have been absolutely useless in ending the atrocity of lynching and, in fact, did everything in their power to block reforms. Yet, in June of 2005, the Democrats were right in the front of the crowd in apologizing for the

Senate's failure to stand against the lynching of thousands of black people, a practice that continued well into the 20th century. They broadbrushed the entire Senate with their crimes against humanity. Once again, when history judges the crimes of the past, there is never a Democrat in sight. They have sullied the reputation of this country since their inception, but when it comes time to lay blame, they have left the scene of the crime.