Two hundred times, they failed to get it done.
They failed after 1899. That was the year an African-American man named Sam Hose was massacred by a white mob near Newnan, Georgia, that castrated him, skinned his face, then cooked him alive over a fire and parceled out pieces of his body; his knuckles were offered for sale by a grocer in Atlanta.
They failed after 1904, too. That was the year an African-American man named Luther Holbert and a woman who was never identified were put to death by a white mob in Doddsville, Mississippi, who used a large corkscrew to drill into the pair’s flesh and yank out raw chunks of them as spectators dined on deviled eggs and lemonade.
And they failed after 1934. That was the year an African-American man named Claude Neal was butchered by a white mob in Marianna, Florida, that castrated, burned and shot him, dragged his ruined body through the streets behind a car and then left it hanging from a tree that still stands in front of the Jackson County Courthouse.
This sort of thing was the opposite of uncommon. As documented by Tuskegee University, it happened 4,743 times between 1882 and 1968, the vast majority of the victims African Americans. Their killers were virtually never tried and even less often punished. And approximately 200 times since 1900, legislation has been introduced in Congress to make lynching a federal crime. Each time, Congress has failed to pass it.