Subject Matter Expert (SME) - Civil Rights Blog #6:
Records Regarding Lynching and Anti-Lynching Efforts in the National Archives
Ray Bottorff Jr
On February 28, 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 422 to 3 followed by the U.S. Senate on March 7, 2022 voting by unanimous consent, passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. It is expected, as of this writing, to be signed into law by President Joseph R. Biden. Its passing represents the culmination of an over 120-year effort to make the act of lynching a federal crime.
“H.R.55 - Emmett Till Antilynching Act” a portion of the first page of the enrolled bill from Congress.gov.
Extrajudicial killings like lynching are nearly as old as the republic itself, as the earliest reported cases date back to the 1830s. “Mob justice” tropes became a recurring theme in Western and frontier fiction which in turn carried over in American popular culture in movies and television during the 20th Century. Historically, extrajudicial killings happened in all places in the United States. They took place everywhere the local populace had little trust in the legal system or where the law was limited, but also in towns and cities where there was established law enforcement and a court system. Until the 1880s, most people who were lynched were white men, usually accused of crimes like rape or murder. From the 1890s onward, the vast majority of those who were murdered were African American, and not just for alleged criminal offenses.
During and after the end of Reconstruction in the 1860s and 1870s, white Southerners began efforts to reassert political control and began the systematic and decades-long effort to disenfranchise African Americans from voting and the political process. These efforts were not limited to legal measures, but acts of violence as well, carried out by ad hoc terror groups or organized domestic terrorist organizations like the Klu Klux Klan (in the case of the Klan, until 1870, though there were other such groups in the South committed lynchings beyond the 1870s.). Lynching became a tool of white supremacy, often hidden under a veneer of “justice,” as those murdered could be accused of rape or some form of sexual assault, attempted rape, or murder.
It is no coincidence the volume of such murders exploded in the American South in the late 1800s at the same time white Southerners were successfully politically disenfranchising African Americans. Violent acts were directed at those who tried to register to vote, run for political office, engage in business in which the main competition was white business owners, refused to defer publicly to white people, ran newspapers, ran religious and educational institutions, engaged in land disputes and disputes with white employers, engaged in consensual sexual relations with white women, suffered sharecropping abuses, and participated in any acts that might empower a local African American population. It was a tool of social and political oppression and terror.
Lynching as a tool of white supremacy was not just directed at African Americans, but at many other minority groups all over the country. From the 1830s onward, white mobs lynched Native Americans (it could be argued that Native Americans had been victims of extrajudicial killings going back to the first colonial settlers), Chinese, Greeks, and Italians. But the largest group outside of African Americans that were the targets of lynching were those in the Latinx community, in particular Mexicans and Mexican Americans.
In the American West and Southwest, from the 1849 California Gold Rush onward, Mexicans became the target of white mobs often due to disputes over land and jobs. The lynchings of Mexicans in the late 1800s were less reported, so efforts at obtaining an accurate counting of those who died are less certain and probably under-counted. Even the Tuskegee Institute, which kept the most accurately known numbers regarding the number of people lynched in the United States during the peak years of lynching, lumped Mexicans, Chinese, and Native American lynching victims under the “white” category, making an exact counting of the number of their deaths more difficult.
The First Efforts at Legislation
By the end of the 19th Century, African Americans began to fight back against the tide of lynchings in the South. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), community leaders like Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and African-American newspapers began an international movement against lynching. Their efforts brought to the attention of the world of the violence being placed on the Black community in the United States.
African Americans also silently protested their conditions in the South by moving away. The Great Migration (1910-1970) resulted in about six million African-Americans moving from the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states.
“Another cause for Negroes leaving the South was lynching” photographic image of the painting by Jacob Lawrence from the series Artworks by Negro Artists, 1922 - 1967, in Collection H: Harmon Foundation Collection, 1922 - 1967s.
National Archives Identification Number (NAID): 559095
These efforts began a public discourse in the African American community and with some white allies about vigilante violence and lynching. The loss of about two million African American laborers in the South between the First and Second World Wars caused labor shortages, forcing white businessmen to rethink the issue of lynching. Eventually, even white politicians, who may not have even cared about the plight of African Americans, saw lynching as a violation of the “rule of law” and began efforts to pass local and state-wide legislation aimed to curb its practice.
The Virginia Anti-Lynching Law of 1928 was the first law in the nation to make lynching a state crime. And that only happened when politicians and business leaders in Virginia realized mob violence was detrimental in attracting business to the State. The law, though, never convicted any white person of lynching a black person. The only persons prosecuted under the statute were those involved in white-on-white lynchings.
Calls for making lynching a federal crime began with the first anti-lynching legislation being proposed in 1900. George Henry White, an African American Republican Congressman from North Carolina, proposed the first anti-lynching legislation. It never made it out of committee. White left The House of Representatives in 1901, with no further African Americans serving in Congress for the next 28 years.
From that time until 2022, it has been estimated that over 200 pieces of legislation were proposed to make lynching a federal offense. All failed to become law until the Emmett Till Antilynching Act.
Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill
Leonidas Dyer, a progressive white Republican member of the House of Representatives from St. Louis, Missouri, first introduced his anti-lynching legislation in 1918. Dyer was moved to present his legislation after being horrified by the race riots in St. Louis and the continued acts of lynching in the South. Dyer’s district was primarily African American, and certainly, his constituents made him aware of the horrors being visited upon the community on a regular basis.
It would not be taken up on a vote in Congress until 1922. When it was forwarded to a vote, the House of Representatives passed the Dyer Bill on January 26, 1922. The legislation also passed the Senate Judiciary Committee and moved to a vote on the floor of The Senate. However, Southern Democrats, in a scene that would happen many times with all sorts of civil rights legislation during the 20th Century, would unify and filibuster the legislation, preventing it from being voted on in 1922, 1923, and 1924.
“Red Record of Lynching Map” from the file unit Papers Accompanying Specific Bills and Resolutions of the Committee on the Judiciary from the 67th Congress within the series Bill Files, 1903 - 1968, in Record Group 233: Records of the U.S. House of Representatives.
This map was submitted by the Colored Women’s Clubs of Michigan to Congress in 1922 in support of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. The map shows the distribution of lynching within the United States and highlights Northern congressmen who voted against the legislation.
National Archives Identification Number (NAID): 149268727
The legislation itself, though not made law, served as a template for future attempts at anti-lynching legislation.
Costigan–Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill
Democratic Senators from Colorado, Edward P. Costigan, and from New York, Robert F. Wagner, co-sponsored the first legislative attempt at an anti-lynching law since the Dyer Bill with the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill in 1934.
The NAACP had strongly supported the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as President in 1932 and had hoped this support would translate into anti-lynching legislation. As the legislation began to be discussed in Congressional committees in 1935, it received the backing of Eleanor Roosevelt, but not of her husband, The President. Franklin Roosevelt was concerned that supporting this and other civil rights legislation would cost him the 1936 election. Even the high-profile lynching of Rubin Stacy on July 19, 1935, couldn’t sway Roosevelt to reconsider. Without President Roosevelt’s support, the legislation never made it to the floor of the Senate for a vote.
“The One Hundred Twenty-Fifth Press Conference of President Franklin D. Roosevelt”, page 5 from the Papers as President, Press Conferences, 1933 - 1945, in the Collection FDR-PPF:
Papers as President, President's Personal File, 1933 - 1945. President Roosevelt’s press conference non-commitment to the Costigan–Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill.
National Archives Identification Number (NAID): 198116
Anti-Lynching Bill of 1937 / Gavagan-Wagner Act / Wagner-Gavagan Act
With the 1936 election behind them, Senator Wagner co-sponsored the Anti-Lynching Bill of 1937 with Democrat Representative Joseph A. Gavagan. Gavagan grew up in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood and saw first-hand the discrimination African Americans, Irish, and other minorities had received. To help sell the law, Gavagan focused on lynching as being “mob rule” and something that undermined the rule of law.
Like the Costigan–Wagner Bill, the demand for action on the law was spurred by the high-profile lynchings of Roosevelt Townes and Robert McDaniels in 1937. Like the Dyer Bill, the Gavagan-Wagner Act passed the House of Representatives. Also, like the Dyer Bill, it was stymied in the Senate by Southern Democrats, never reaching a vote there.
President Roosevelt was finally persuaded to do something about lynching in the United States. In 1939 he created the Civil Rights Section in the Justice Department. But it took until 1946 before the Section convicted anyone for lynching. Even that conviction only resulted in a $1,000 fine.
“Press Release, Statement of the Attorney General on the Proposed Civil Rights Legislation before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights of the Senate Judiciary Committee, 2/14/1957”, a portion of page 14, from the file unit Civil Rights Bill within the series Personal Files of E. Frederic Morrow, 1950 - 1961, in the Collection DDE-1045: Records of E. Frederic Morrow, Administrative Officer, Special Projects Group (Eisenhower Administration), 1950 - 1961. Attorney General Morrow explains briefly the original function and purpose of Roosevelt’s Civil Rights Section in the Department of Justice.
National Archives Identification Number (NAID): 12167080
Cold War and the Civil Rights Era
Changes in attitudes about lynching, the public anti-lynching campaigns pushed by numerous civil rights organizations, and local and state laws against lynchings lowered the deaths by lynching so much that by 1952 the NAACP recorded the first year without a known lynching. Lynchings still happened, but they were more infrequent and less likely to involve large mobs.
As the Cold War with the Soviet Union began, the U.S.S.R. frequently would focus the international spotlight on lynching and segregation in the United States. This was especially the case whenever the United States criticized Soviet human rights abuses. As colonial powers began to relinquish control over wide swaths of Africa and Asia, the United States and the U.S.S.R. began to heavily court these nations for influence. The Communist Bloc was ready to use America’s history of violent white supremacy to help with its efforts to influence the rest of the world. Fear of worldwide communist domination helped make the issue of civil rights and lynching a matter of national security.
In 1949, Senator Wagner would again propose anti-lynching legislation, this time a bi-partisan bill with fellow Democratic Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota and Republican Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon. The largest difference between the Humphrey-Wagner-Morse Bill and the previous bills was a focus on the United States treaty obligations as a charter member of the United Nations and its conventions involving human rights. That bill along with two other anti-lynching bills submitted at the same time by Republican Senator Homer Ferguson of Michigan and Democratic Senator J. Howard McGrath of Rhode Island failed to forward out of committee to a vote in the Congress.
In 1951, Paul Robeson, along with the Civil Rights Congress, charged the United States government of genocide for failing to address lynching during a presentation given to the United Nations. Actions such as these put further international pressure on the United States even by its own allies.
“Diary Notes of Charles Ross, 1946”, page 49 (image 50), from the file unit Ross, Mr. and Mrs. Charles G. [Truman's Potsdam diary] within the series Personal Files, 1945 - 1953, in the Collection HST-PSF: President's Secretary's Files (Truman Administration), 1945 - 1960. Charles Ross's diary recollection of the meeting of Paul Robeson and a “delegation” with President Harry S. Truman regarding lynching on Monday, September 23, 1946.
National Archives Identification Number (NAID): 183568265
The lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 marked a milestone in the post-war civil rights struggles. In an era of television, picture-heavy print magazines like Life, Look, and Ebony, and investigative journalism, the decision of Till’s mother, Mamie Till, to have an open casket showing his brutalized body helped galvanize the African American community into action. Till’s murder was one of the first events that triggered the modern Civil Rights Movement.
During the remainder of the 1950s and into the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement was able to achieve success in federal legislation. One thing it did not result in was anti-lynching legislation. This was due in part to the fact that some acts of lynching were now being prosecuted as civil rights or criminal violations by States and the Justice Department using existing laws. Also, apart from some horrific examples, lynching had become rather infrequent by the 1960s. Lastly, a focus on civil rights, voting rights, housing rights, various hate crime laws, and other such legislation became the priority for politicians for the next four decades. The demand for anti-lynching laws began to recede from general public consciousness, though politicians would still submit anti-lynching legislation periodically.
An Apology and Finally a Law
In 2005, Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia were the primary sponsors of a non-binding Senate resolution apologizing for the Senate’s failure to pass anti-lynching legislation. On February 13, 2005, the Senate approved the resolution which, in part, read, “apologizes to the victims of lynching for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation”.
As welcome as this resolution was, the criticism of it being “too little, too late” was a common refrain. Also that this apology about not passing anti-lynching legislation in the past included no actual anti-lynching legislation itself was not lost on its critics.
In June 2018, Democratic Senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey and Republican Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina proposed the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018. Unanimously, the Act was passed by the Senate on December 19, 2018, but failed to be taken up by the House before that session of Congress ended in January 2019.
On January 3, 2019, Democratic Representative Bobby Rush of Illinois proposed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act. The Act was an updated version of the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2019 and was passed by the House on February 26, 2020. But Republican Senator Rand Paul blocked the legislation from being considered in the Senate. He argued that the law was too broad and that it needed to include a "serious bodily injury standard". So again, the legislation died in the Senate.
As the 117th Congress began, Representative Rush submitted the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, this time with the "serious bodily injury standard". The act modified the existing Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which was signed into law on October 28, 2009. The Act would define lynching as any death or serious bodily injury resulting from a conspired bias-motivated offense.
Finally, after over a century of efforts, an anti-lynching law was passed by the United States Congress.
The records of the U.S. Senate (Record Group 46) and U.S. House of Representatives (Record Group 233) provides a source of documents and correspondence on the drafting of the 120 years’ worth of anti-lynching records. The Center for Legislative Archives holds the historically valuable records of the U.S. Congress, including official committee records. To research congressional records and legislative history regarding efforts to make lynching a federal crime, start with the Center’s online search catalog or contact them directly at legislative.archives@nara.gov. The Center for Legislative Archives is located at the National Archives building in Washington, DC.
Please note: Congressional records are made available according to the access policies set by the creator of the records -- most House records open when they are 30 years old and most Senate records open when they are 20 years old. So, legislation from the last 20 to 30 years is not yet available to researchers.
Records of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Section and later the Civil Rights Division are located within Record Group 60: General Records of the Department of Justice, 1790 - 2002. Records involving lynching could be found in Letters Received (Source Chronological Files), 1871 - 1884, within the files under the Classification 144 - Civil Rights, as well as the Offices of the Attorney General or the Assistant Attorney General. These and other Department of Justice records are found in the National Archives at College Park, MD.
Unfortunately, the nature of some of these records requires that some are fully restricted, and many others are partially restricted to the public. If a record has such a restriction, researchers must make a request under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
Several Presidents called for anti-lynching legislation while in office. Presidential records relating to lynching are located at the individual presidential libraries. Eleanor Roosevelt’s records are found in the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.
Records for presidential libraries can be accessed both on-site and online and you can begin your research for them here.
Please note: Due to COVID-19 facility closures and evolving arrangements pertaining to research, you should call or correspond with staff at each facility before visiting to be briefed on the status of current research and arrangements.