With a unanimous vote, the Senate on Monday passed The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which makes lynching a federal hate crime.
The bill is named in honor of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black teenager who was brutally tortured and murdered in Mississippi in 1955, after a white woman falsely claimed he propositioned her. Lynchings have been used to instill fear in Black and Mexican-American communities, and Congress attempted to pass anti-lynching legislation more than 200 times prior to Monday, with efforts going back to the early 1900s.
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