The anti-lynching legislation that was introduced, (or contemplated) and uniformly successfully blocked (or its supporters dissuaded from even filing) by filibusters before 1957, was the least-possibly-intrusive federal reaction to the problem. And it was addressed to only the most obvious and vile symptom of institutionalized southern racism. Buckland writes,

Murder has always been against the law. If local prosecutors couldn’t get people interested in prosecuting local miscreants then guys in suits from DC sure wouldn’t. That’s just the way the South worked at the time.

But the point of the legislation was not that it would let guys in suits from DC try to get local people to prosecute racial murders. It was to give local U.S. attorneys power to bring federal court lawsuits, based on indictments from federal grand juries, before judges who (like the U.S. attorneys) had been picked by the President and confirmed by the Senate. Such prosecutors, grand juries, and judges were (and are) less vulnerable to local pressures and biases. And federal juries are drawn from panels summoned from larger (less parochial and locally dominated) federal districts. The intent of the federal legislation was to bypass local prosecutorial and judicial indifference, local grand jury reluctance to indict, and local jury nullification — all of which combined to prevent effective enforcement of state criminal statutes in so many racially motivated violent crimes, including lynchings.

Had it not been for filibustering by southern senators, those anti-lynching bills would have passed. Would there have been resistance to their implementation? Absolutely. There would have quite probably been violent resistance, and more of it than there eventually was in the 1950s and 1960s when broader civil rights measures began to be implemented through executive orders (desegregation of the military) and, eventually, legislation (starting with the almost toothless Civil Rights Act of 1957, which LBJ brilliantly and cynically gutted to avoid a filibuster). But would some offenders have been punished who got away with their crimes under state enforcement? Would others have perhaps been deterred? I think the answer to those questions, more probably than not, is also yes.

So I can’t agree with Buckland that these anti-lynching bills would not “actually [have] do[ne] anything important” had they been passed. And I’m unconvinced that the price paid by victims of institutionalized racism in the interim was worth the arguably smoother implementation of civil rights laws later.

The other point I’d add to the discussion is that it’s not just the southern senators (in that day, uniformly Democrats) who participated in (or threatened) the filibusters who bear moral responsibility for the obstruction of civil rights legislation. By themselves, those southerners could not defeat a cloture vote. They always relied upon non-southern allies from both political parties. The southerners enlisted such allies’ support through rhetorical misdirection, claiming that they were championing not racism, but “States’ rights,” “protection of the minority,” and the Senate tradition of unlimited debate. Sometimes they elisted such allies’ support through log-rolling other local or regional legislation important to the allies, or bestowing (or withholding) important committee seats — carrots and sticks that the southerners had in their power to control disproportionately to their own numbers by virtue of their domination of Senate committees under the seniority system.

(I write, by the way, as a third-generation Texan who’s alternately proud of most parts of that heritage, and sickened and repelled by some other parts. I can and do admire Robert E. Lee or John Bell Hood as gentlemen and warriors and generals, but condemn the cause for which they fought, and I have absolutely no desire to fly the Confederate battle flag.)

Steven Taylor’s got a nice post on the filibuster, lynchings, and the Senate. He also reprints a map showing which states were the worst offenders; no real surprises, I’m afraid.

You make a very legitimate point. However, even if the laws were symbolic, there is something to be said against the idea of filibustering the attempt.

I think that there is usefulness, even if it is limited, in acknowledging past wrongs in our democracy.

Further, as one who deeply believes in fundamental human freedom, I find it difficult to extol a symbol that was used in a war fought to defend slavery, and then later used as a symbol of defiance against desegregation (and not just by fringe groups). This strikes me as highly problematic.

As reputed Klansman Edgar Ray Killen goes on trial for his role in the Philadelphia Three murders, the U.S. Senate decided to apologize for its complicity in Klan terrorism, which I suppose would be a more meaningful gesture if more than 6% of the Sena…

I can see why the senates in past years decided not do act – they had little power to act meaningfully. States were much more independent then. The house passed the bills between 1920 and 1940. The federal role in law enforcement was limited to things that dealt with suspects crossing state lines. The feds were chasing bank robbers and booze runners (including some ancestors of mine) only when they sought refuge in a state away from the crime. J. Edgar Hoover as head of the only federal law enforcement agency at that time and was very hesitant to expand duties to include organized crime, much less local issues.

Passing a bill making lynchings illegal then would have been the equivalent of today’s Senate declaring a week “National Sugar Beet Growers Week�. It would express the will of the body, but not actually do anything important. But unlike National Sugar Beet Growers Week it would have really ticked off some of the senators that the administrations needed to get work done.

Murder has always been against the law. If local prosecutors couldn’t get people interested in prosecuting local miscreants then guys in suits from DC sure wouldn’t. That’s just the way the South worked at the time.

The years 1920-1940 were eventful years. Events included recover from the Great War, stock market boom and bust, depression, prohibition, the rise of organized crime, and preparation for an even Greater War. Picking a fight with states over what was seen as local criminal matters just wasn’t going to happen. Not until the war ended and federal role was expanded in people’s minds would any such legislation be meaningful.