The examination of the two featured pages of a 1921 House anti-lynching report can facilitate an engaging inquiry into the continued absence of a federal lynching law as well as historical efforts by lawmakers and civic groups to promote justice and change. In the decades between the end of the Civil War and the 1920s, thousands of individuals were lynched--seized by mobs and murdered, usually in a spectacle of torture and degradation. In many cases, the victims had been accused of crimes and were taken from police custody, at times with the open cooperation of law enforcement and local government officials. Some victims were lynched because their businesses were competing with white-owned businesses, some were lynched based on rumors of interracial sex, some were lynched because they appeared in uniform after wartime service, and some were lynched under no pretext at all. Men and women were lynched, white and black, in all regions of the United States, but lynching victims were overwhelmingly African American men in the southeastern states, their public deaths serving to reinforce a centuriesold racial power structure through terror.