LONG OVERDUE

Lynching Has Finally Been Made a Federal Crime

“Hate never goes away, it only hides under the rocks,” Biden said. “If it gets a little bit of oxygen, it comes roaring back out, screaming. What stops it? All of us.”

President Joe Biden signed into law on Tuesday a bill that makes lynching a federal hate crime, after more than a century of previous unsuccessful efforts to criminalize the act of racial hatred. “Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal,” Biden said at a White House Rose Garden signing ceremony, surrounded by reporters and civil rights leaders. “Terror, to systematically undermine hard, hard fought civil rights.” The bill, sponsored by Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL), is named for Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy murdered in Mississippi in 1955. It passed the House in February with three Republican lawmakers opposed, and the Senate earlier this month with unanimous support. Legislation to outlaw lynching was first introduced—and defeated—in 1900. The same pattern repeated itself more than 200 times over the next 12 decades. Vice President Kamala Harris said Tuesday that lynching is “not a relic” of times long past. “Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation,” she said. “And when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators to account.”