Senate unanimously passes historic anti-lynching bill

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.

The measure was introducing in the House by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) and in the Senate by Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.); it now heads to President Biden's desk for his signature. In a statement, Rush said lynching is "a long-standing and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy. Perpetrators of lynching got away with murder time and time again — in most cases, they were never even brought to trial. ... Today, we correct this historic and abhorrent injustice."

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Between 1882 and 1968, more than 4,000 people, most of them Black, were reported lynched in the United States, and 99 percent of the perpetrators went unpunished, Rush's office said.