On this day in 1921, President Warren Harding delivered the first speech by a president condemning the lynching of blacks by Southerners. Harding spoke out against these illegal hangings — committed primarily by white supremacists — in Birmingham, Ala., amid increasing racism and racial violence throughout the Deep South.
Large population shifts in the wake of World War I had raised racial tensions throughout much of the country. As the 1920 Republican presidential nominee, Harding had advocated civil rights for blacks, despite evidence of wide opposition among white voters. At the time, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People reported that lynchings claimed the lives of, on average, two blacks every week.
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In Birmingham, Harding voiced support for anti-lynching bills pending in Congress. Legislation seeking to curb the practice was initially sponsored in 1918 by Rep. Leonidas Dyer (R-Mo.); Sen. Charles Curtis (R-Kan.) sponsored a companion measure in the Senate. They called for $10,000 fines to be levied against any county where a lynching occurred, for the prosecution of negligent state and county officials in federal courts and for the lodging of federal murder charges against participants.
Although the House approved the bill in 1922, a phalanx of Southern Democrats mounted a successful filibuster against it in the Senate. Efforts to enact similar legislation languished on Capitol Hill until the 1930s, when Sens. Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Edward Costigan (D-Colo.) took up the cause. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, refused to back their bill, fearing it would cost him Southern electoral support and jeopardize his 1936 reelection bid.
It took 42 more years for Congress to enact broad civil rights legislation that, among other provisions, protected blacks against officially sanctioned discrimination. In 2005, the Senate passed a resolution formally apologizing for its repeated failure to enact anti-lynching bills.
Source: “Incredible Era: The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding,” by Samuel Hopkins Adams (1939)