Dyer Bill

By: Kate Tuttle

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Dyer Bill

Proposed law that would have made lynching a federal crime, never passed by the United States Congress.

In the years between Reconstruction (1865–1877) and American involvement in World War I (1914–1918), African Americans were increasingly vulnerable to attack from white mobs. Many black men were being killed through beatings, burnings, and hangings. In the South, where most lynchings took place, perpetrators (who sometimes claimed that the victim had raped a white woman) were almost never punished. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in its first major political effort, sought to enact a federal law that would bring lynch mobs to justice.

The bill's sponsor was Congressman Leonidas Dyer, a white Republican from Missouri. In 1918 Dyer introduced a bill before Congress that would have, with the guarantee of due process under the Fourteenth Amendment, subjected lynch mobs to a charge of capital murder for their actions. In addition, the bill included a provision that would have fined local law enforcement officials who failed to prosecute such criminals.

Initially the NAACP failed to fully support the law, largely because its president, white lawyer Moorfield Storey, questioned the law's constitutionality (the issue was whether or not it overstepped the states' own jurisdiction in murder cases). By 1919, the NAACP, led by James Weldon Johnson and Walter White, had begun to lobby heavily for the bill to be passed. Their efforts led the House of Representatives to pass the Dyer Bill in a vote of 231 to 119. Lacking strong Republican backing in the Senate, however, the bill languished in committee and then became the object of a filibuster by Southern Democrats. Failing to reach a vote by the close of the Sixty-Eighth Congress, the bill died in 1923. In the end, as historian Robert Zangrando writes, “the anti-lynching bill was … displaced by the indifference of its friends and the strategy of its enemies.” Congressman Dyer reintroduced the bill each year until 1929, but neither house passed it.

See also Lynching.

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