The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, introduced by Representative Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican from Saint Louis, Missouri, in the US House of Representatives in 1918, was directed at punishing lynchings and mob violence.
Lynchings were committed mostly by whites against blacks (88% of victims were black) in the South (59% of lynchings.) They first peaked in the years immediately following the Civil War, falling off sharply with the dissolution of the first Ku Klux Klan. They reached a second peak in the 1890s and continued at relatively high levels for decades after, in what is often called the nadir of American race relations, a period marked by discrimination across the country.
Read more about Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill: Background, 21st Century Apology
Famous quotes containing the words dyer and/or bill:
“My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such present joys therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
That earth affords or grows by kind.
Though much I want which most would have,
Yet still my mind forbids to crave.”
—Sir Edward Dyer (c. 1540–1607)
“No, the five hundred was the sum they named
To pay the doctor’s bill and tide me over.
It’s that or fight, and I don’t want to fight
I just want to get settled in my life....”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)