Photo Courtesy of the Sun Times
Congress passed a historical bill that categorizes lynching as a federal hate crime. The legislation now needs to be approved by President Joe Biden to become a law.
On March 7, H.R.55 or the Emmett Till Antilynching Act “passed the Senate without amendment by unanimous consent.” It was first introduced in January 2021. The bill would make lynching punishable by serving time in prison, a fine or both.
“After more than 200 failed attempts to outlaw lynching, Congress is finally succeeding in taking a long-overdue action bypassing the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act,” said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY.
Specific language in the legislation defined lynching as “a premeditated extrajudicial killing by a group.\3\ The term has been most often used to characterize informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor or to intimidate a group. Lynching can also be employed as an extreme form of informal group social control, and often conducted with the display of a public spectacle for maximum intimidation.”
The maximum sentence the crime is punishable for is 30 years.
Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., the main proponent of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, told NBC News that the bill “sends a clear and emphatic message that our nation will no longer ignore this shameful chapter of our history and that the full force of the U.S. federal government will always be brought to bear against those who commit this heinous act.”
“Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy,” he explained.
The bill is named after Emmett Till, who
was brutally lynched when he was 14-years-old after visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955. The Chicago native was kidnapped, beaten, and his body mutilated after being accused of whistling at a white woman. His murder marked a crucial moment in the civil rights movement. His mother, Mamie, also shocked the world when she decided to have an open casket to display the brutality and insidiousness of his murder.