U.S. President Joe Biden signed into law the first federal legislation introduced lynching a federal hate crime in the country after civil rights groups promoted such a measure for more than a century.
The law is named after the age of 14 Emmett Tillwho was brutally murdered in a racist attack in Mississippi in 1955 – an event that drew national attention to the atrocities and violence faced by African Americans and inspired the American civil rights movement.
“There is no federal law prohibiting lynching as of today,” Biden said Tuesday after signing Emmett’s Anti-Lynching Act during a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden.
“Lynching is pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone, belongs to America, not all people are created equal,” he said. .
The new law will give authorities more tools to prosecute hate crimes as an “act of arrest” when a conspiracy results in death or serious bodily injury. It stipulates a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and a fine.
The civil rights group NAACP described secession as “acts of public violence that whites used to terrorize and control blacks in the 19th and 20th centuries, especially in the South.” ” of the country.
“Lynchings often conjure up images of Black men and women being hanged from trees, but they involve other extreme atrocities, such as torture, mutilation, beheading, and damnation. Some of the victims were burned alive,” said the group website.
Al Jazeera’s Rosiland Jordan, reporting from Washington, said lynching “was a horrible way of terrorizing the newly liberated African-American community in this country – and it worked”.
“It has effectively deterred people from trying to start businesses, trying to send their children to school, trying to get involved in the political process, trying to own property.”
That was echoed by US Vice President Kamala Harris, who said at a signing ceremony Tuesday that victims of lynching are targeted “because they are working to build a better America.” “.
“Those killed, they are business owners, creating economic opportunities in their communities that will all prosper and benefit,” Harris said. “They are the educators of America’s next generation of leaders. They are activists defending the sacred right to freedom of elections. “
The legislation comes at a time when the US continues to face systemic racism in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests that rocked the country in 2020 following a police killing. George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“Racism is not an old problem. It was a nagging problem,” Biden said Tuesday, recalling a deadly protest 2017 of white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Congress first considered the anti-relaxation law more than 120 years ago.
It was unable to pass such legislation nearly 200 times, beginning with a bill introduced in 1900 by Representative George Henry White, who was the only Black member of Congress at the time.
The NAACP began lobbying for anti-austerity legislation in the 1920s. A federal hate crimes law was finally passed and signed into law in the 1990s, decades after the movement. civil rights of the United States.
Emmett .’s Anti-Lyinging Act was adopted in the House by a 422-3 vote earlier this month after removing the Senate by unanimous consent.
“For the first time in American history, we finally [to] making lynching a FEDERAL hate crime. And we are doing it on behalf of Emmett Till,” US Representative Bobby Rush wrote on Twitter Tuesday before the bill was signed. “It’s time to address this historic injustice.”
Until traveled from his home in Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi in 1955, where he was kidnapped, beaten, and shot to death. A large metal fan was tied around his neck by barbed wire before his body was thrown into the river.
His mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open casket at the funeral to show the brutality her son had to endure.
Till was accused of whistling with Roy Bryant’s wife, who was on trial for the kidnap and murder of the boy. Bryant was acquitted by an all-white jury, although witnesses saw him and his half-brother, JW Milam, take Till from his relative’s home.
Bryant and Milam later told a magazine writer that they had kidnapped and killed Till.
Till’s relatives presented Mississippi authorities with a petition signed by 250,000 people calling for the state reopen its investigation into the killing.
They believe Bryant’s ex-wife, Carolyn Bryant Donham, now 80 years old and living in North Carolina, played a key role in Till’s murder. Bryant and Milam have both passed away.
Today, @POTUS will sign my Emmett until #AntilynchingAct into law.
For the first time in American history, we are finally treating it as a FEDERAL hate crime. And we’re doing it in the name of Emmett Till.
It is time to address this historical injustice. pic.twitter.com/2SR92ufCKU
– Bobby L. Rush (@RepBobbyRush) March 29, 2022
