Faced with anti-lynching legislation in the late 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt said that if he supported it, southern committee chairs would “block every bill I ask Congress to pass to keep America from collapsing.”13 Moreover, if you weren’t acceptable to southern Democrats, you weren’t going to be the Democrats’ nominee for president in the first place: the party required a two-thirds supermajority of delegates to the national convention to approve a presidential ticket, which meant the South held an effective veto over a hostile nominee.
