President Biden has signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act
Emmett Till is shown lying on his bed. © Getty Images / Bettmann
US President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law on Tuesday, making lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in American history. The law is named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy who was tortured and killed by two white men in Mississippi in 1955.
“Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone belongs in America and not everyone is created equal,” the president said at the White House after signing the bill. “Racial hate isn’t an old problem. It’s a persistent problem. Hate never goes away. It only hides. All of us have to stop it.”
Earlier this month, the bill passed the Senate by unanimous consent and the House of Representatives by a vote of 422 with only 3 congressmen voting against it.
The Emmett Till Act makes it possible to prosecute as a hate crime any conspiracy to commit a lynching that results in death or serious bodily injury. The law defines ‘hate crimes’ as “offenses involving actual or perceived race, color, religion, or national origin.”
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US Vice President Kamala Harris, who co-sponsored the legislation during her tenure as a senator from California, supported the president’s move to sign the bill by saying, “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.”
Harris also noted that anti-lynching legislation was first introduced in Congress in 1900. It took over a century and 200 hearings in Congress to finally adopt this law against hate crimes.
Emmett Till became a symbol for civil rights activists after his mother decided to have his casket open at the funeral to show the world his mutilated body. In August 1955, he allegedly made a sexual advance towards a white woman – a claim rejected by his relatives. The woman’s husband and brother were prosecuted over Emmett’s death, but were acquitted by the jury. Later, they confessed to committing the murder in a magazine interview, but were never put on trial again.
According to findings from Tuskegee University, between 1882 and 1968, 4,743 people were lynched in the United States, including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 white people.
