Lynching in USA is a hate crime now, President Biden signs Emmett Till Antilynching Act

President Joe Biden signed a landmark bill making lynching a federal hate crime on Tuesday, capping a more than century-long effort to adopt anti-lynching legislation.

The endeavour began 122 years ago, when U.S. House of Representatives member George Henry White, the only Black member of Congress at the time, filed the first anti-lynching bill in Congress. That law failed; the years passed, and numerous attempts to pass similar legislation failed.

However, the Senate enacted the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act in March, paving the way for Biden to sign it. The bill was introduced by Senators Cory Booker and Tim Scott, as well as House Representative Bobby Rush, and is named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was brutally kidnapped and murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955.

I just signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law — making lynching a federal hate crime for the first time in American history.

— President Biden (@POTUS) March 29, 2022

What happened to Emmett Till and who was he?

Till was 14 years old in the summer of 1955 when he travelled from his hometown of Chicago, Illinois to visit family in Mississippi. Till was described as a “jokester” who “liked to make people laugh” by a cousin who grew up with him in Chicago, according to the New York Times.

Till and his cousins went to Bryant’s Grocery, a tiny business in Money, Mississippi, on August 24, 1955, to get some refreshments. Till allegedly flirted or whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman working at the business, there. Bryant stormed out of the store to get a pistol, and Till and his cousins followed.

Then, four nights later, on Aug. 28, two men kidnapped Till in the middle of the night from his relatives’ home. Roy Bryant, Carolyn’s husband, and J.W. Milam, Roy’s half brother, were the two males. They kidnapped Till and transported him to a distant barn, where he was horribly tortured and executed. His remains were thrown into the Tallahatchie River. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Till was badly assaulted, shot in the head, and had a fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.

Just weeks later, Roy and Milam were placed on trial for Till’s murder, but they were acquitted by an all-white, male jury. They were paid to confess to Till’s murder for a magazine piece after their acquittal. The account they supplied the magazine is thought to be highly fabricated. The FBI revisited the Till investigation in 2004 to discover whether anyone other than Roy and Milam, who were both dead at the time, had been involved in the murder. There were no fresh leads discovered during the inquiry, and the case was closed in 2006. The Department of Justice reopened the investigation in 2017 following a report of probable new evidence, however it was closed again in December 2021.

What was the aftermath of Till’s death?

Mamie Till, Till’s mother, wanted the world to know the savagery of her son’s murder when his mangled remains were returned to her in Chicago. Till’s assailants masked his face completely. Mamie assisted in the organisation of a massive funeral attended by hundreds of people, and she permitted the media to shoot and publish photographs of her son’s open casket.

The broadcast showed the heinousness of his death and shed light on the violence and prejudice that Black people in America faced during the Jim Crow era. Activists banded together in the aftermath of Till’s lynching and launched a campaign to end Jim Crow and other forms of discrimination against African-Americans, which became known as the Civil Rights movement.