At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America by Philip Dray

Author:Philip Dray [Dray, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Americas (North; Central; South; West Indies), Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies, Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780375503245
Amazon: 0375754458
Goodreads: 2472613
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2002-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

James Weldon Johnson and the NAACP knew the South’s resistance would harden considerably in the Senate. To succeed there would require the strong advocacy of a senator who would fight as vigorously for its passage as had Congressman Dyer in the House. They saw their best hope in longtime Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the Republican majority leader. The Harvard-educated Lodge was one of the most powerful men in Congress, although somewhat unpredictable and known for being prickly toward those with whom he disagreed. A Mugwump—a Northern Republican who espoused reactionary, Populist-like sentiments on issues such as immigration and foreign affairs—he had favored U.S. internationalism and entry into the Spanish-American War, then vehemently opposed the country’s membership in the League of Nations. He had helped draft the Sherman Anti-Trust Law of 1890, and then— shocked, like countless Americans, by the revelations about slaughter-houses and the packaged-food industry in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle—sponsored the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. But he had vehemently opposed women’s suffrage.

Lodge had often tangled with the Southern bloc in the Senate, dating back to his cosponsorship in 1891 of the so-called Force Bill that would have provided direct federal supervision of national elections—a bill that determined Southern lawmakers filibustered to its grave. He had worked diligently for the election of Warren Harding in 1920, and he remained close to the president. The NAACP believed that Lodge was the kind of political warrior who, if he put his mind to it, and with a Republican Senate and president behind him, might carry the antilynching bill to victory.

The association made certain that Lodge, as one of the leaders of the Republican party, understood that after six decades of unflagging loyalty to the so-called Party of Lincoln, black Americans expected something in return. The group had not been coy about letting its membership know that, if the Republicans could not deliver on the Dyer measure, no self-respecting black should vote Republican in the upcoming midterm congressional elections of 1922. And in an extremely rare and provocative move by a junior member of the party, Dyer himself traveled to Massachusetts, Lodge’s home state, to tell a gathering that should Lodge fail to get the lynching bill passed, they should work to defeat him in his bid for reelection.

The NAACP had a sympathizer but not necessarily an ally in another important Senate personage—Judiciary Committee chair William E. Borah of Idaho, known to his colleagues as the “Big Potato.” Like Lodge, Borah was capable of gifted advocacy in the name of progressive causes, but also held passionately conservative, isolationist views. He explained to Johnson that while he saw lynching as an abomination that should be abolished, he was not sure he could support the Dyer Bill on constitutional grounds. Borah typified a problem the NAACP encountered with numerous legislators: most were attorneys and considered themselves experts on constitutional issues, and were unwilling to leave the constitutionality question to the courts, where the NAACP believed it rightly belonged.

Appearing before Borah’s committee, Johnson argued for a federal role in suppressing mob violence.

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