World / US House passes anti-lynching law 120 yrs after 1st attempt

The New York Times : Feb 28, 2020, 10:13 AM
Since at least 1900, members of the House and Senate have tried to pass a law making lynching a federal crime. The bills were consistently blocked, shelved or ignored, and the passage of time has rendered anti-lynching legislation increasingly symbolic.

But on Wednesday, a measure to add lynching to the United States Criminal Code passed in the House. The Senate passed a version of the bill last year.

Once the bills are formally reconciled, the legislation can be sent to the Oval Office, where President Trump is expected to sign it into law.

The House bill, called the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, was introduced by Representative Bobby Rush, a Democrat from Illinois. The Senate bill, which passed unanimously last year, was introduced by Kamala Harris, Democrat of California; Cory Booker, Democrat of New Jersey; and Tim Scott, Republican of South Carolina.

“Today brings us one step closer to finally reconciling a dark chapter in our nation’s history,” Mr. Booker said in a statement about the passage of the House bill on Wednesday.

The bill makes lynching a hate crime and describes it as “a pernicious and pervasive tool” that was often carried out “by multiple offenders and groups rather than isolated individuals.”

“We are one step closer to finally outlawing this heinous practice and achieving justice for over 4,000 victims of lynching,” Mr. Rush said in a statement when the House vote was announced last week.

He cited Emmett Till, one of thousands of lynching victims during the Jim Crow era. Emmett was brutally tortured and killed in 1955, when he was 14, after a white woman accused him of grabbing her and whistling at her in a grocery store in Mississippi. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, fought against a quick burial so her son’s mutilated body could be viewed and photographed, to “let the world see what I have seen.”

The two white men who were charged with killing Emmett were acquitted by an all-white jury. At the time, it was often the case that perpetrators of racist violence were either acquitted or not prosecuted at all.

“The importance of this bill cannot be overstated,” Mr. Rush said in his statement.

“From Charlottesville to El Paso, we are still being confronted with the same violent racism and hatred that took the life of Emmett and so many others,” he said, referring to white supremacist rallies in Virginia in 2017 and a mass shooting in Texas last year in which the authorities said Latinos were targeted. “The passage of this bill will send a strong and clear message to the nation that we will not tolerate this bigotry.”

Murder is typically prosecuted at the state or local level, but the House and Senate bills would make lynching a federal crime. It fits a longstanding pattern: Civil rights legislation has often been passed at the federal level after individual states did not act.

Racially motivated killings have continued to occur in the United States since the end of the Jim Crow era. High-profile cases include those of James Byrd Jr., a black man who was brutally murdered by three white men in Texas in 1998, and the nine black parishioners who were killed in a church massacre in South Carolina in 2015.

But a bill in 2020 cannot protect the thousands of people who were victims of racist violence decades ago.

“When it really mattered, and when it really would have had the impact of protecting the lives of black people in this country, there was widespread unwillingness” to pass a bill like this, said Tameka Bradley Hobbs, an associate professor of history at Florida Memorial University and the author of “Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home: Racial Violence in Florida.”

She added that when she spoke to people about her research, many said that they were not aware of the devastating scale and continuing impact of racist violence in the United States.

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