Photo Courtesy of Reuters
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden put his John Hancock on the first-ever federal law that makes lynching a hate crime.
Vice-President Kamala Harris spoke about Biden passing the long-overdue bill.
“Lynching is not a relic of the past. Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation. And when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators to account,” she said.
The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill (HR-55) was presented to the commander-in-chief on March 28. Congress passed the historic bill on March 7.
NewsOnyx previously reported that the new legislation defined lynching as “a premeditated extrajudicial killing by a group” characterized by “informal public executions by a mob in order to punish an alleged transgressor or to intimidate a group.”
The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill is punishable by up to 30 years in prison.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said about the bill, “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.”
Although the legislation’s namesake is after the 14-year-old Chicago teen brutally murdered by racist whites in Mississippi in 1955, the first anti-lynching law was
introduced by the only Black American in the 55th and 56th Congress, George Henry White. On January 20, 1900, White introduced the legislation to make the act a federal crime. The Judiciary Committee shot it down.