After 120 years of efforts in Congress, lynching might finally become a federal hate crime. The Senate—both historically and currently the main congressional obstacle to progress—has already passed a bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Tim Scott, and the House is voting on its own version on Wednesday.
The House bill, introduced by Rep. Bobby Rush, is named after Emmett Till, the teenager lynched in 1955 whose mother made the nation pay attention by leaving his casket open at his funeral and refusing to hide how her son had been mutilated. Rush’s statement on the bill insisted that this is not a problem of the past. “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.
“A lot of folks will say, ‘Well, it’s not relevant today; it’s not necessary today.’ But lynching violence was created by politics of fear and anger, and we should never assume that an era of fear and anger will never occur again,” Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, told The New York Times. And passing a federal anti-lynching bill doesn’t mean the work is complete.
”There’s much more that could be done in terms of our curriculum to make sure that folks understood the full scope of anti-black violence in American history,” historian Tameka Bradley Hobbs told the Times. “I think if they understood that, perhaps they would understand the Black Lives Matter movement as an extension of centuries, really, of advocacy on the part of African-Americans.”
The Senate apologized in 2005 for its decades of blocking anti-lynching legislation, with Sen. Mary Landrieu telling hundreds of relatives of lynching victims, “The Senate failed you and your ancestors and our nation.” But it’s taken another 15 years to get to the point of passing such a bill.
Murder has always been a crime, of course, but as the Till case and so many others show, lynchings often went unprosecuted, or killers were acquitted by all-white juries—failings that happened directly at the state level but were allowed to continue by a federal government that did not press for justice.
The racist killings of today may not involve mobs of people publicly hanging, burning, and torturing their victims, often in full view of law enforcement, but it’s still important for the federal government to be on the record that lynching is a hate crime, full stop.
Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill. (And then brag about how only he could get it done.)