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.