The House passed a bill that would make lynching a federal hate crime.
The House voted 422-3 to approve the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which would allow crimes to be prosecuted as lynching if someone is killed or injured in the commission of a hate crime. The crime would be punishable for up to 30 years.
Three Republicans voted against the bill—Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.), Thomas Massie (Ky.) and Chip Roy (Tex.).
The bill is named after Till, a 14-year-old Black teenager from Chicago who was abducted, tortured and shot in the head in 1955. His crime— allegedly whistling at a white woman in a Mississippi store.
Two men were charged with murdering Till but were acquitted by an all-White, all-male jury. The men later confessed to the crime. Carolyn Donham, the woman Till was accused of making sexual advances towards, confessed in 2017 that she had previously lied about her version of events.
“I was eight years old when my mother put the photograph of Emmett Till’s brutalized body that ran in Jet magazine on our living room coffee table, pointed to it, and said, ‘this is why I brought my boys out of Albany, Georgia,'” Representative Bobby L. Rush, Democrat of Illinois. said. “That photograph shaped my consciousness as a Black man in America, changed the course of my life, and changed our nation.”
Rush says we are still a long way from true progress, adding that “modern-day lynchings like the murder of Ahmaud Arbery make abundantly clear that the racist hatred and terror that fueled the lynching of Emmett Till lynching are far too prevalent in America to this day.”
Lawmakers have failed to pass anti-lynching bills more than 200 times since 1900.
“The House today has sent a resounding message that our nation is finally reckoning with one of the darkest and most horrific periods of our history, and that we are morally and legally committed to changing course,” said Rush, who was a civil-rights leader and founder of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party.
