What an anti-lynching law means in 2022

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed into law a bill that classifies lynching as a federal hate crime, punishable by up to 30 years in prison. Though Biden emphasized the significance of the legislation during a ceremony and praised its broad support, the bill’s path to approval has been fraught: It has taken more than 100 years and 200 attempts for proponents to achieve victory.

The Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act, named after the 14-year-old boy who was kidnapped, brutally beaten, and shot by a mob of white men in Mississippi in 1955 before they threw him into a river, allows an act to be prosecuted as a lynching when a person conspires to commit a hate crime that results in death, serious bodily injury, and other serious harms.

The bill’s passage is long overdue, but its arrival still has an important symbolic power and will give federal prosecutors another tool to prosecute some of the country’s most brutal hate crimes. In other words, the act builds on the severity of the federal hate crimes laws that already exist.

“Lynching is a clear example of one’s inhumanity toward another. It’s a uniquely American act of terrorism that is motivated by hatred, and, before today, was never punished by our legal system,” Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL), the longtime sponsor of the legislation, told Vox. “Emmett Till would’ve been 80 years old. I’m 75, and I just imagine the kinds of contributions he would have made to our society. Biden’s signing of the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act sends a message that America will no longer continue to ignore this shameful chapter of our history and that the government engaged in legislative failure for far too long.”