NAACP Lobbies Congress for Federal Anti-Lynching Law, Blocked Every Session for Decades

Between 1882 and 1968, Congress introduced over 200 anti-lynching bills, none of which became law. The NAACP organized the most sustained lobbying campaign in the early twentieth century: petitions with hundreds of thousands of signatures, delegations to the White House, publication of detailed lynching statistics in The Crisis, testimony before Congress, and public education campaigns. Southern senators filibustered or bottled up every bill in committee. The campaign revealed that anti-Black violence had explicit Congressional protection — a defining fact of American governance.