When the U.S. Senate chose June 13 as the day to apologize for failing to pass an anti-lynching law, it provided a convenient opportunity to exercise some poetic justice. It allowed us to consider its mea culpa as an early birthday salute to James Weldon Johnson, who probably fought harder than anyone to get such legislation enacted.
Born June 17, 1871, Johnson is perhaps best known these days for writing the lyrics to “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” commonly referred to as the black national anthem. But he had many careers: novelist, poet, editor, diplomat, lawyer. It was in his pivotal rote as field secretary of the NAACP that Johnson took on lynching.
He had been energized by the summer of 1919, often called the Red Summer because blood flowed so frequently in American streets. “During the summer, bloody race riots occurred in Chicago, in Omaha, in Longview, Texas, in Phillips County, Arkansas, in Washington, and other communities,” Johnson recalled in his autobiography, Along This Way.
Among the victims of fatal violence was a World War I veteran who, in Johnson’s words, “was lynched because of the fact that he wore the uniform of a United States soldier.”
That same year, Johnson began his campaign. Eighty-three lynchings were recorded in 1919. The practice had been slowly declining since its peak year in 1892, when 230 such killings were recorded. Still, the sickening brutality of the acts remained, and even one lynching was too many.
With his NAACP colleagues, Johnson “tried through publicity and protest to make them (lynchings) means of arousing the conscience of the nation against the shame of America, the shame of being the only civilized country in the world, the only spot anywhere in the world where such things could be.”
He joined forces with a Republican congressman, L.C. Dyer, who agreed to sponsor an anti-lynching bill. For almost two years Johnson worked as a one-man lobbying concern in the nation’s capital.
“I tramped the corridors of the Capitol and the two office buildings so constantly that toward the end, I could, I think, have been able to find my way about blindfolded,” he later recalled.
“I saw and talked with every man in Congress who was interested in the bill or who, I thought, could be won over to it.”
While Johnson was working the Hill, his NAACP colleagues worked everywhere else, stirring up support among the rank and file. The effort “roused the colored people of the country,” Johnson wrote. “The Dyer bill brought out the greatest concerted action I have yet seen the colored people take.”
Debate on the House floor was bitter. Rep. Thomas Upton Sisson, a Democrat from Mississippi, justified lynching as apt punishment for black rascals who assaulted white women. But Johnson had provided House members with statistics showing that “less than 17 percent of the victims of lynching in 33 years had even been charged by the mob with rape” The bill passed in the House by a vote of 230 to 119.
A memo urging the Senate to pass the Dyer bill was signed by “27 state governors; 39 mayors of cities; 47 jurists and lawyers; 88 bishops and churchmen, including 3 archbishops; 29 college presidents and professors; 30 editors and 37 other prominent and influential citizens.”
The NAACP placed an ad in eight prominent newspapers. For Johnson, the ad “set forth the salient facts about lynching, and probably caused more intelligent people to think seriously on the shame of America than any other single effort ever made.”
But it didn’t sway the Senate. It voted to abandon the bill on Dec. 2, 1922. While Johnson later wrote that the Senate’s action filled him with disgust, he also insisted on seeing some small measure of progress.
“The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill did not become a law, but it made the floors of Congress a forum in which the facts were discussed and brought home to the American people as they had never been before,” he wrote.
“It served to awaken the people of the Southern states to the necessity of taking steps themselves to wipe out the crime; and this, I think, was its most far-reaching result.”
Johnson would probably regard the Senate’s embarrassingly tardy apology as a mere first step in a journey that is far from complete. His famous lyrics continue to resonate as much as they did when he composed them more than a century ago:
“Facing the rising sun of our new day begun, Let us march on till victory is won.”