U.S. President Joe Biden signs into law HR 55, the “Emmett Period Antispasmodic Act,” during a ceremony at the White House in Washington, March 29, 2022.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden signed Emmett Till The Antilynching Act on Tuesday, making lynching a federal hate crime after more than a century of unsuccessful attempts by Congress to pass similar legislation.
The bill is named after Till, a 14-year-old black teenager in Chicago who was kidnapped, tortured, and shot in early 1955 after a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham, said he whistled. flute and touch her in a store in Mississippi. .
The Senate passed the bill on March 7 by unanimous consent, showing no objections, after the House of Representatives passed it on February 28 in a 422-3 vote. Three votes against this measure came from the GOP Delegates. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Chip Roy of Texas and Andrew S. Clyde of Georgia.
Congress has failed to pass anti-easing bills more than 200 times since 1900.
Biden said during the bill signing ceremony that the anti-branch law isn’t just about the civil rights struggle from decades ago, citing the 2020 shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery and the demonstrations of white supremacism unfolding. out in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
“From the bullets in the back of Ahmaud Arbery to countless other acts of violence, countless victims known and unknown, the same racial hatred that caused the mob to hang the noose that carried the crowd. brought the torch out of the fields of Charlottesville just a few years,” Biden said.
“Racial hatred is not an old problem – it is a persistent one,” he added.
The enacted legislation, introduced by Representative Bobby Rush, D-Ill., would make it possible to prosecute one count of conspiring to commit a hate crime resulting in death or serious bodily injury , with the perpetrators facing 30 years in prison. prison.
“For the first time in American history, we’re making it a FEDERAL hate crime. And we’re doing it in the name of Emmett Till,” Rush said. in a tweet Tuesday. “It’s time to address this historic injustice.”
ONE report by the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit that provides legal representation to prisoners wrongly convicted of crimes, found that nearly 6,500 cases have taken place in the United States since from 1865 to 1950.
