President Warren G. Harding voiced support for anti-lynching bills pending in Congress. President Harding condemns lynching: Oct. 21, 1921

On this day in 1921, Warren G. Harding delivered the first speech by a president condemning the lynching of blacks by Southerners.

Harding spoke out against these illegal hangings — committed primarily by white supremacists — in Birmingham, Alabama, amid signs of increasing racism and racial violence throughout the Deep South.


Large internal population shifts in the wake of World War I had raised racial tensions throughout much of the United States. As the 1920 Republican presidential nominee, Harding had advocated civil rights for blacks, despite evidence of wide opposition among white voters. At the time, the NAACCP reported that lynchings claimed the lives of, on average, two blacks every week.

In Birmingham, Harding voiced support for anti-lynching bills pending in Congress. Legislation seeking to curb the practice was initially sponsored in 1918 by Rep. Leonidas Dyer (R-Mo.); Sen. Charles Curtis (R-Kan.) sponsored a companion measure in the Senate. They called for $10,000 fines to be levied against any county where a lynching occurred, for the prosecution of negligent state and county officials in federal courts and for the lodging of federal murder charges against participants.

In April 1919, the NAACP published a report assailing the myth that most lynchings reflected African-American attacks on white women: less than one sixth of the 2,500 African-Americans lynched from 1889 to 1918 had even been accused of rape. Dyer, who represented a majority African-American district, had taken notice of the hate crimes occurring around him and was outraged by the violence and disregard for law evident in such riots.

Although the Republican-controlled House approved the bill in 1922, a phalanx of Southern Democrats mounted a successful filibuster against it in the Senate. Efforts to enact similar legislation languished on Capitol Hill until the 1930s, when Sens. Robert Wagner (D-N.Y.) and Edward Costigan (D-Colo.) took up the cause. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, refused to back their bill, fearing it would cost him Southern electoral support and jeopardize his passage of his New Deal programs and his forthcoming 1936 reelection bid.

It took 42 more years for Congress to enact broad civil rights legislation that, among other provisions, protected blacks against officially sanctioned discrimination. In 2005, the Senate passed a resolution formally apologizing for its repeated failure to enact anti-lynching bills.

SOURCE: “INCREDIBLE ERA: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF WARREN GAMALIEL HARDING,” BY SAMUEL HOPKINS ADAMS (1939)

