A black lawmaker’s anti-lynching bill failed 120 years ago. Now, the House may finally act.

In 1900, 120 years ago this week, the nation’s only black congressman stood on the House floor to read an unprecedented piece of anti-lynching legislation to a roomful of white faces.

Just over a year earlier, the congressman, Rep. George Henry White (R-N.C.), had witnessed the bloody Wilmington, N.C., race riot in which mobs of white supremacists overthrew the city’s multiracial government while killing possibly as many as 60 black people with impunity. White had engaged in painstaking research, tracking down every lynching victim he could find, in Wilmington and in every corner of the country over the past two years.