The Anti-lynching Movement, the Dyer Anti-lynching Bill, and Racialized Autocracy

• In Event: Racial and Ethnic Minorities Section Roundtables Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table One: Historical Sociological Perspectives on Race and Racism

Abstract

Briefly reviewing the history of Black organizing against racial autocracy in the United States would reveal the possibility of parallel movement outcomes between the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Movement. The former protest cycle preceded the landmark Civil Rights laws of the 1960s and the latter preceded the March 2022 Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, with the Emmett Till Act representing the first federal anti-lynching law. However, the anti-lynching act is not exactly novel; prior to 2022, the battle for anti-lynching legislation was waged for more than a century, beginning with the 1922 Dyer Anti-Lynching bill. Correspondingly, the lack of federal anti-lynching legislation is indicative of the persistence of a most brutal and bizarre aspect of racial autocracy through the middle of the 20th century. In this paper, we examine the failure of the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill as an opportunity to explain the persistence of racial autocracy over time. In doing so, we emphasize the institutionality of the racial state as an entity whose members both craft legislation about race and also act as retainers of racial knowledges and ideologies. By engaging in a comparative institutional analysis of the NAACP’s early anti-racist investigations of lynching with congressional debates over the 1922 Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, we find that one of the key explanations for the failure of the bill – and subsequent persistence of lynching as a core practice of racial autocracy – is not only simply a lack of aligned political interests, but also an adherence to hegemonic racial beliefs surrounding race and White femininity. We conclude that it is necessary to carefully recover and parse what Omi and Winant’s contextualization of the racial state within Gramscian hegemony means for understanding challenges to racial autocracy with the goal of understanding social movement contestation within the dynamics of racial consent.

Authors

• George Weddington, University of New Mexico-Albuquerque

• Aisha Ariantique Upton Azzam, St. Catherine University