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
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