President Joe Biden is set to sign the nation’s first federal antilynching act.
This act is named after Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black teenage boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 by a white mob.
We reported that the bill was successfully passed by Congress after more than 200 attempts to make lynching a federal hate crime.
Once it is established as a law, the act will make “lynching an offense made by a person conspiring to commit a hate crime that results in someone’s death or serious bodily injury.”
Senator Cory Booker made a statement about the newly passed bill, “After over 100 years and 200 failed attempts to pass anti-lynching legislation, America is finally about to make this shameful, hateful practice a federal crime and take a critical step towards reckoning with our nation’s history of racialized violence.”
He continued, “This bill will not undo the trauma and pain of the past, but the federal government will finally be saying what it should have done over a century ago. We will not tolerate hatred, violence, and brutality against our fellow Americans.”