This Day in Republican History 4/18/06

April 18, 1920 Minnesota’s first-in-the-nation anti-lynching law, promoted by African-American Republican Nellie Francis, signed by Republican Gov. Jacob Preus 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. The Republican-led 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.