Congress has tried more than 200 times to pass an anti-lynching law. This year, it could fail again
It was nearly a century ago that Rep. Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican from Missouri, introduced a bill to make lynching a federal crime. With vigilante slayings of African-Americans rampant, it promised to force the federal government to prosecute lynch mobs for murder.
The bill wasn't the first in Congress to target lynchings. Others had tried to stop the killings carried out largely against blacks by angry Southern whites who nearly always got away without punishment. (The first attempt, in 1900, by Rep. George H. White, a North Carolina Republican and the only black person in Congress, was defeated in committee.) But Dyer's legislation was the first to have a serious chance of becoming law when it passed in the House of Representatives and made it out of committee in the Senate.
Southern Democratic senators
