Many blacks felt betrayed by the Republicans due to the bill's slow process to the Senate. A silent protest march by many blacks took place in front of the Capital grounds and White House in 1922 while the bill's constitutionality was being contemplated. A protest sign read, "Congress discusses constitutionality while the smoke of burning bodies darkens the heavens." Senate filibuster 1922 After Dyer's bill reached the Senate and received a favorable report from the Judiciary Committee, some Republican senators, including most prominently William Borah, an otherwise progressive Senator from Idaho, spoke against it. Borah was concerned about issues of state sovereignty and believed that the bill was not constitutional. He was especially concerned about the clause that provided for federal authorities to punish state officials "remiss in the suppression of lynchings." A prolonged filibuster by Southern white Democrats prevented consideration of the bill and defeated it. 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. 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'." Aftermath and legacy Following the defeat of his first bill in the Senate in 1922, Dyer tried unsuccessfully twice more to get it passed by the Senate. Some of the bill's opponents claimed that the threat of lynching protected white women from sexual advances from black men. The studies by the journalist Ida B. Wells in the late 1890s had shown that black lynch victims were accused of rape or attempted rape only one third of the time. 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". In 1919, according to the Pittsburgh Gazette Times, many Southerners viewed the practice of lynching as a sporting event. In 1923, to gain national support for his anti-lynching bill, which was to be heard again that year in the Senate, Dyer toured the