WASHINGTON — In July 1937, as Congress prepared to adjourn and leave the nation’s capital during the most sweltering weeks of summer, a pro-civil-rights senator turned to an arcane procedural maneuver in an attempt to force his chamber to take up an anti-lynching bill.
He launched a filibuster.
It worked. To end the lengthy, last-minute debate, the Senate leader agreed to bring the legislation to the floor upon the lawmakers’ return.
But the bill ultimately would meet its demise early the next year through the same means: a filibuster, this time by civil rights opponents, that spanned some six weeks. This one included late-night sessions, two failed votes to end debate, and a lawmaker who spoke for four days straight. The death of the legislation was a blow to the years-long struggle by Black activists to end one of the many violent tactics — in this case, murder by hanging — that white Southerners used to terrorize Black people and keep them from the ballot box.
This grim turn of events, historians and political scientists say, is essential in understanding the role of the filibuster in the struggle for civil rights. Dating to the 1800s, it has been used by lawmakers to both advance and thwart Black racial progress — but it is in the thwarting of that progress that it has been used with greatest frequency and success.
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