It is important to know exactly what they are proposing to apologize for:
Congressman Leonidas Dyer of Missouri first introduced his Anti-Lynching Bill--known as the Dyer Bill--into Congress in 1918. The NAACP supported the passage of this bill from 1919 onward; they had not done so initially, arguing that the bill was unconstitutional based on the recommendations of Moorfield Storey, a lawyer and the first president of the NAACP. Storey revised his position in 1918 and from 1919 onward the NAACP supported Dyer's anti-lynching legislation. The Dyer Bill was passed by the House of Representatives on the 26th of January 1922, and was given a favorable report by the Senate Committee assigned to report on it in July 1922, but its passage was halted by a filibuster in the Senate. Efforts to pass similar legislation were not taken up again until the 1930s with the Costigan-Wagner Bill. The Dyer Bill influenced the text of anti-lynching legislation promoted by the NAACP into the 1950s, including the Costigan-Wagner Bill
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While the bill was stalled by a Senate filibuster, a systemized, institutionalized reign of terror that was used to maintain the power Whites had over Blacks and to keep Blacks fearful and forestall Black progress moved forward unabated. For decades lynching was a constant source of intimidation to all Blacks and a constant reminder of their defenselessness. The Senate filibuster cost the lives of thousands Afrikan men and women.
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The following statements made by southern Congressmen during the Dyer Bill debate suggest that they were more concerned with White supremacy and the oppression of Blacks than they were with constitutional issues.
Senator James Buchanan of Texas claimed that in "the Southern States and in secret meetings of the Negro race [White liberals] preach the damnable doctrine of social equality which excites the criminal sensualities of the criminal element of the Negro race and directly incites the diabolical crime of rape upon the white women. Lynching follows as swift as lightning, and all the statutes of State and Nation cannot stop it."
Representative Percy Quin of Mississippi, spoke of lynch law, "Whenever an infamous outrage is committed upon a [Southern] White woman the law is enforced by the neighbors of the woman who has been outraged? The colored people of [the South] realize the manner of that enforcement, and that is the one method by which the horrible crime of rape has been held down where the Negro element is in a large majority. The man who believes that the Negro race is all bad is mistaken. But you must recollect that there is an element of barbarism in the black man, and the people around where he lives recognize that fact."
Representative Sisson of Mississippi said, "as long as rape continues lynching will continue. For this crime, and this crime alone, the South has not hesitated to administer swift and certain punishment....We are going to protect our girls and womenfolk from these black brutes. When these black fiends keep their hands off the throats of the women of the South then lynching will stop...."
Representative Benjamin Tillman from South Carolina claimed that the Dyer Bill would eliminate the states and "substitute for the starry banner of the Republic, a black flag of tyrannical centralized government...black as the face and heart of the rapist...who [recently] deflowered and killed Margaret Lear," a White girl in South Carolina.18 Tillman asked why anyone should care about the "burning of an occasional ravisher," when the House had more important concerns.
Senator T.H. Caraway of Arkansas claimed that the NAACP, "wrote this bill and handed it to the proponents of it. These people had but one idea in view, and that was to make rape permissible, and to allow the guilty to go unpunished if that rape should be committed by a Negro against a white woman in the South."
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