President Joe Biden signed into law the Emmett Till Antilynching Act on Tuesday, making lynching a federal hate crime after more than a century of failed efforts in Congress to pass similar legislation.
The bill is named after Till, a 14-year-old black teenager from Chicago who was kidnapped, tortured, and shot in the head in 1955 after a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Dunham, said he whistled and touched her in a Mississippi store.
The Senate approved the bill on March 7 unanimously, indicating no opposition, after the Senate passed it on February 28 by 422 to 3. The three votes against the measure came from Republican Representatives Thomas Massey of Kentucky, Chip Roy of Texas and Andrew S Clyde of Georgia.
Congress has failed to pass lynching laws more than 200 times since 1900.
Biden said during the law-signing ceremony that the anti-familial law wasn’t just about the decades-old civil rights struggle, citing the 2020 shooting of Ahmed Arbery and a white supremacist rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
From the bullets in the back of Ahmaud Arbery to countless other acts of violence, and known and unknown victims to countless victims, the same racial hatred that drove the mob to the gallows drove the torch-bearing mob out of the Charlottesville fields within years. Only a few Biden said.
“Racist hate is not an old problem – it’s an ongoing problem,” he added.
The enacted legislation, introduced by Representative Bobby Rush, Democrat, would make it possible to prosecute a crime such as lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime results in death or serious bodily injury, with offenders facing up to 30 years in prison.
“For the first time in US history, we’re making lynching a federal hate crime,” Rush said. “And we’re doing it in the name of Emmett Till.” in a tweet Tuesday. It is time to correct this historical injustice.”
a Transfer By the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit organization that provides legal representation to wrongfully convicted prisoners, found that nearly 6,500 lynchings occurred in the United States from 1865 to 1950.
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