In the heat of the conservative backlash against Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, North Carolina Senator Josiah Bailey had some thoughts on an anti-lynching bill. “The proposed lynching bill,” he asserted, “is the forerunner of a policy studiously cultivated by agitators” and “would promptly be followed by a civil rights bill, drawn upon the lines of the bill which Thad Stevens tried to put upon the South…I give you warning.” Bailey delivered those remarks during a filibuster.

The so-called Southern Bloc’s filibuster against Roosevelt’s one modest attempt at advancing racial justice for Black Americans, is a particularly grotesque example of the abuse that has been endemic to the filibuster since its inception. But the filibuster was born in racism, and for generations was used almost exclusively by segregationist Democrats to thwart civil rights legislation of all kinds. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina filibustered the 1957 Civil Rights Act for 100 days, And (again) North Carolina’s Jesse Helms initiated a filibustered against the Martin Luther King, jr. holiday. During that episode, Helms distributed documents containing gutter attacks on the civil rights leader that prompted Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan to drop them at Helms’s feet in disgust.

The filibuster continued to be a favorite tool of Southern reactionaries in the 20th century. Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky took filibustering to new heights during the Obama administration, leaving so many judicial openings that it enabled Donald Trump to insert a bloated number of appointees into the federal judiciary. The filibuster was conceived by Southern conservatives to prevent progressive initiatives, particularly on racial issues, and has scarcely ever been used to keep the nation from going backward.

In fact, the term “filibuster” first entered the American lexicon in the context of proslavery imperialism. Slaveholding Southern adventurers calling themselves “filibusteros” launched privateer attacks on the nation of Cuba in an effort to seize its territory for an expanded slave republic. Their efforts were quickly rendered farcical, but they represented Southern ambitions to create new slave territories in the Carribbean that if successful would have made the Confederacy much more likely to win the Civil War. In that case, slavery could have persisted in this hemisphere for generations beyond when it was finally extinguished by Cuba in 1886.

Now, the filibuster threatens to render Joe Biden’s presidency stillborn. McConnell has given every indication that he will obstruct the Biden administration using his tool of choice. And yet, key Senate Democrats remain wedded to the filibuster and have stated in unequivocal terms that they will work for its preservation. They argue that it perpetuates traditions of civility and bipartisanship in the Senate, which of course of have been inoperable for decades. More blatantly absurd is their insistence that the filibuster saved the Affordable Care Act–repeal was poised to go through on a party line vote before John McCain cast the decisive vote against–or that Democrats could use it to prevent Republican legislation in the future. There is no historical precedent for such an event.

Unlike Republicans who can pass their top priorities of tax cuts and judicial confirmations with 51 votes, Democrats aspire to pass substantive legislation. They will not be able to do so without abolishing the filibuster. It would be tragic if during this profound crisis in America Democrats allowed a musty old practice, buried in the Senate rule book by historical racists, to keep their ambitions from coming true.