The National Conference on Lynching took place in Carnegie Hall, New York City, May 5–6, 1919. The goal of the conference was to pressure Congress to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, sponsored by Leonidas Dyer (R-MO). It was a project of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909. Recently the group had been working to publicize and try to end the continued lynchings, mostly of black men. In April they released a report, Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States, 1889-1918. The late 19th and early 20th century years were the nadir of race relations, with high rates of violence against blacks, especially in the South, where white Democrat-dominated legislatures had also disenfranchised African Americans during this period, excluding them from the political system.