Biden signs Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act

President Joe Biden signs the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act in the Rose Garden of the White House, Tuesday, March 29, 2022, in Washington. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) (Patrick Semansky, Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed a bill into law to make lynching a federal hate crime, more than 100 years after such legislation was first proposed.

The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is named after the Black teenager whose killing in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 became a galvanizing moment in the civil rights era. His grieving mother insisted on an open casket to show everyone how her son had been brutalized.

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Michelle Duster, great-granddaughter of civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells, speaks after President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act in the Rose Garden of the White House, Tuesday, March 29, 2022, in Washington. Vice President Kamala Harris looks on at left. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

The new law, to be signed by Biden in a Rose Garden ceremony, makes it possible to prosecute a crime as a lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime leads to death or serious bodily injury, according to the bill’s champion, Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill. The law lays out a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and fines.

The House approved the bill 422-3 on March 7, with eight members not voting, after it cleared the Senate by unanimous consent. Rush also had introduced a bill in January 2019 that the House passed 410-4 before that measure stalled in the Senate.

President Joe Biden speaks after signing the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act in the Rose Garden of the White House, Tuesday, March 29, 2022, in Washington. Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and Michelle Duster, great-granddaughter of civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells look on. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky) (Copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.)

Congress first considered anti-lynching legislation more than 120 years ago. It had failed to pass such legislation nearly 200 times, beginning with a bill introduced in 1900 by North Carolina Rep. George Henry White, the only Black member of Congress at the time.

The NAACP began lobbying for anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s. A federal hate crime statute eventually was passed and signed into law in the 1990s, decades after the civil rights movement.

FILE - An undated portrait shows Emmett Till. The 14-year-old from Chicago was visiting relatives in Mississippi in August 1955 when he was kidnapped, tortured and killed after witnesses heard him whistle at a white woman. Till's mother insisted on an open-casket funeral, and Jet magazine published photos of his brutalized body. Those images galvanized the civil rights movement. On Feb. 28, 2022, a Mississippi county approved contracts for a bronze statue of Till that will be put in a park. (AP Photo/File)

Till, 14, had traveled from his Chicago home to visit relatives in Mississippi in 1955 when it was alleged that he whistled at a white woman. Till was kidnapped, beaten and shot in the head. A large metal fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire before his body was thrown into a river. His mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open casket at the funeral to show the brutality her child had suffered.

Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam, were accused, but acquitted by an all-white-male jury. Bryant and Milam later told a reporter that they kidnapped and killed Till.

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