The first anti-lynching bill was proposed by a Black congressman 105 years ago. In 1922, the House of Representatives passed the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, and two other times the House passed similar legislation. However, all three bills were blocked from passage by filibusters in the Senate led by powerful Democratic senators from the South. Democratic president Franklin Roosevelt, who was in office from 1933 to 1945, refused to press for passage of anti-lynching legislation.

“We’re actually calling this ‘Freedom Summer,’” Doria Johnson of Evanston, Illinois, told the Washington Post. “We’ve got the FBI’s reopening of the Emmett Till murder case in Mississippi, the trial for the murders of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner starting, and the apology for lynching on the same day. We’re finally feeling that our families’ suffering is being acknowledged.” Johnson was one of some 200 descendants and family members of lynching victims in Washington to witness the Senate vote.

More than 4,700 people were lynched from 1882 to 1968, most of them Black and in the South, according to a Tuskegee University study. Lynching and the threat of lynching was key to the system of legal and extralegal terror that enforced Jim Crow segregation, until it was smashed by the mass civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.  
 
 
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