United States President Joe Biden has made history after signing the first law that marks lynching as a federal hate crime after more than 200 attempts in the last century to get the bill to the president's desk.
The legislation is crucial because the absence of such a law has allowed the vast majority of perpetrators to go unpunished in cases of nearly documented 6,500 racial terror lynchings from 1865 to 1950. Under the bill, a crime would be prosecuted as a lynching when death or serious bodily injury results from a conspiracy to commit a hate crime.
Lynching as a Federal Hate Crime
The new bill would result in up to 30 years of imprisonment for any individual convicted of lynching. Lawmakers named the legislation in honor of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was brutally tortured and murdered in 1955 in Mississippi. His death helped spark the civil rights movement.
Many see the signing of the bill as a step forward and is believed to be the United States coming to terms with how lynching was used to enforce a racial social order at the risk of violence against people of color, as per Axios.
In a statement at the White House, Biden said that his signing of the "Emmett Till Antilynching Act" was a first in American history. The Democrat said that lynching was an act of pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone belonged in America or was created equal. Biden considered the act to have systematically undermined hard-fought civil rights.
Vice President Kamala Harris, who co-sponsored previous anti-lynching legislation at the time that she was still a senator, said that the act was a stain on the history of the United States. She said that thousands of people across the nation were tortured and murdered by vigilantes.
According to Yahoo News, many lawmakers are rejoicing in the signing of the bill, including Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush, who has been an advocate of the measure for several years. On Mar. 7, the bill was unanimously passed in the Senate after it was blocked in 2020. Rush was among those who stood behind President Biden when he was signing the bill.
Repeatedly Futile Efforts
Legislation to criminalize lynching was first introduced in 1900 and again the following years but has repeatedly been blocked, especially by Southern senators during the Jim Crow era. Harris was joined by Democratic Sen. Cory Booker sponsored the newest legislation last year.
However, the vice president also praised South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott and Rush, both of whom have spent years trying to get the bill to pass. Biden and Harris both gave credit to Ida B. Wells, a Black journalist who previously fought against lynching in the last 19th and early 20th centuries. She became one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
On Tuesday, one of Wells' descendants, Michelle Duster, spoke at the event, saying that the late journalist carefully chronicled names, dates, locations, and excuses used to justify lynchings. She was believed to have written articles and pamphlets and made speeches about the horrific atrocities, the New York Times reported.
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