'It is never too late to do the right thing': House passes federal anti-lynching bill
The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would make lynching a federal hate crime, a major victory for advocates who have long sought to address America’s history of racial violence.
The Emmettth Till Antilynching Act, introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.), passed with an overwhelming 410-4 vote. The Senate passed a similar bill, backed by Sens. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), last February with broad bipartisan support. The Senate will need to vote on the House bill before it goes to the White House to be signed into law.
“I am just so, more than words can express, so delighted that finally after over 200 tries in Congress, finally after former Congressman Leonidas Dyer ... sponsored legislation in 1902 and it passed the House and failed in the Senate,” Rush told reporters before the vote. “We’re finally poised to pass the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in the House today.”
Rush added that he had been assured by Senate sponsors that the bill would be brought up for a vote and passed in the upper chamber by the end of the week, meaning Congress could pass the legislation by the end of Black History Month.
Congress’s attempts to address the racially-driven mob killings date back over a century, but past House bills have either stalled or been blocked in the Senate. The bill is named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teen from Chicago who was lynched in 1955 while visiting family in Mississippi. The incident drew national attention, especially after his mother insisted on an open-casket funeral and photos of his disfigured face circulated nationwide.
“That picture of Emmett in that casket catalyzed an entire nation,” Rush told reporters ahead of the vote.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said it was fitting that the measure was named after Till, and that the “bill is late in coming, but it is never too late to do the right thing.”
“Lynching was a blot on the history of America, but the even greater blot is the silence that for too long maintained in the context of what people knew was happening,” Hoyer said.
The brutal practice emerged after slavery ended and was mainly used against black people by mobs of angry whites. A majority of lynchings took place in the American South, and of the 4,743 recorded lynching which took place between 1882 and 1968, 72.7% of the victims were black, according to the NAACP.
Rep. Karen Bass (D-Calif.), who chairs the Congressional Black Caucus, said though lynchings took on a different form when groups such as the Ku Klux Klan began carrying them out after abolition, the practice was also used to terrorize enslaved people and prevent them from rebelling.
“And frankly even today periodically you hear new stories of nooses being left on college campuses, worker locker rooms, to threaten and terrorize African Americans, a vicious reminder that the past is never that far away,” Bass said.
Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who last year worked to introduce House legislation to mirror the Senate bill’s language, said on the House floor earlier on Wednesday that Congress was closer than it had ever been making lynching a federal crime, and that the action was long overdue.
“We will finally get this to the president’s desk to be signed into law in order to close one of the ugliest chapters in America’s history once and for all,” he said.
