Leonidas Carstarphen Dyer (June 11, 1871 – December 15, 1957) was an American politician, reformer, civil rights activist, and military officer.

As a progressive reformer, Dyer authored an anti-usury law in 1914 that limited excessive loan rates by bank lenders in the nation's capital, then still governed by Congress.

In January 1922, Dyer's bill was passed by the House, which approved it by a wide margin due to "insistent countrywide demand".

In 1919, Dyer authored the motor-vehicle theft law, which made transporting stolen automobiles across state lines a federal crime.

[4] His father's family had roots in Virginia, where his uncle David Patterson Dyer was born; he was elected as a Republican Congressman from Missouri (1869–71).

[6] When the Spanish–American War began, Dyer joined the United States Army and served in combat during the Santiago campaign as a private in 1898.

[1] After the war, the young Dyer served as assistant circuit attorney in St. Louis, where he championed an anti-usury reform campaign that eventually gained national attention.

[1] He was repeatedly re-elected, though his time in Congress was briefly interrupted between 1914 and 1915 due to a dispute over 1912 election results[citation needed], but was reelected in 1914.

They were disappointed by the Republican failure to pass an anti-lynching bill during the 1920s,[2] and attracted to Democratic candidates during the Great Depression, after Franklin D. Roosevelt had started some of his work and welfare programs.

[7] Dyer continued his anti-usury campaign in 1914 by authoring a law that prevented banks from charging excessive interest rates on loans in Washington, D.C., which was then governed by Congress.

Dyer believed that money lenders went after financially vulnerable people, authorizing loan contracts for unnecessary purposes.

According to Dyer, the tube extension would promote business and private citizens in East St. Louis by reducing delivery time by 11 hours and 50 minutes.

They settled in St. Louis along with immigrants from southern and eastern Europe where industrialization had led to a strong economy and an increase in jobs.

[9] In his speech, he anticipated some members likely objections about the federal government sponsoring "social" legislation, and noted that lynching violated individuals' rights under the 14th Amendment.

[12]Black leaders in the North had insisted that the Republican Party National platform for the presidential election of 1920 include support for anti-lynching legislation.

In the South, most blacks had been disfranchised from 1890 to 1911 by constitutional changes and discriminatory legislation after southern Democrats regained power in the state legislatures.

Proponents of Dyer's anti-lynching bill believed that lynching and mob violence took away African-American citizens' rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.

A silent protest march by many blacks took place in front of the Capitol grounds and White House in 1922 while the bill's constitutionality was being contemplated.

After the Democrats had held up voting on all the national business in the Senate for a week in December 1922 by their filibuster, the Republicans realized they could not overcome the tactic and finally conceded defeat on Dyer's bill.

[9] Senator Lee S. Overman of North Carolina told The New York Times that the "good negroes of the South did not want the legislation for 'they do not need it'.

[18] Rather, the murders of blacks were an extreme form of white extrajudicial punishment and community control, often targeting blacks who were economic competitors with whites, who were trying to advance in society, who were in debt to landowners (settlement season for sharecroppers was a time of high rates of lynchings in rural areas), or those who failed to "stay in their place".

He thanked the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for supporting his bill and praised their continuing to publicize the terrible human toll of lynching in the United States.

Dyer's campaign received positive coverage by the white mainstream press, which helped strengthen an anti-lynching movement in the West.

[21] The national attention received by Dyer's anti-lynching bill and speaking campaign may have helped reduce lynchings in the South.

More significantly, the Great Migration was underway, and black workers by the tens of thousands were leaving the South for Northern and Midwestern industrial cities, for jobs, education, and a chance to escape Jim Crow laws and violence.

[9] In 1935 and 1938, Senator Borah repeated his constitutional arguments against the bill; he added that he believed such legislation was no longer needed, because the rate of lynchings had fallen so dramatically.

The South was essentially a one-party, Democratic region in which only whites voted and held office, well into the 1960s, but Congressional representation was based on the total population.

The New York Curb Exchange (NYCE) on April 10, 1929, had received a letter written by Dyer that demanded he be returned money after he had bought and sold at a loss Canadian whiskey company Hiram Walker stock.

During his second term in office, on June 19, 1914, he was suspended from taking his seat in the House of Representatives due to contested voting election returns in 1912 in Missouri's 12th District.

[6] Black voters had been disappointed that the Republicans had failed to deliver on their promise to pass an anti-lynching law, part of the national platform in 1920,[2] and by President Hoover's approach to dealing with economic problems.