The President usually says a few words before converting the law into law. But Joe Biden turned the script on Tuesday when it came time to sign his signature on the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act.
they signed the bill on a desk White House Rose Garden. Speak again.
“Okay. This is the law,” said the president, who was surrounded by Vice President Kamala Harris, members of Congress, and top Justice Department officials. Descendants of the black journalist Ida B. Wells who reported the lynchings and Till K. Cousin Rev Wheeler Parker was also involved.
“It’s a little unusual to sign a bill, say nothing and then speak. But that’s how we set it up,” Biden said.
He thanked an audience of civil rights leaders, Congressional Black Caucus members and other guests who insisted on the law to “never give up, never give up.”
Congress first considered the anti-lynching law 120 years ago. By March of this year, it had failed to pass such legislation nearly 200 times, beginning with a bill introduced in 1900 by North Carolina Rep. George Henry White, who was the only black member of Congress at the time.
Harris was the major sponsor of the bill when she was in the Senate.
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The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is named after the black teenager whose murder in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 became an inspiring moment in the civil rights era. His grieving mother insisted on an open coffin to show everyone how her son was brutally beaten.
“It’s been a long time coming,” said Parker, who was on stage with Joe Biden when the president signed the bill. Parker, two years older than Till, was with his cousin at their relatives’ home in Mississippi and witnessed Till’s kidnapping.
In his remarks, Biden acknowledged the struggle to get a law on the books, and described how lynching was used to terrorize and intimidate blacks in the United States. He said more than 4,400 blacks died between 1877 and 1950, mostly in the South.
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“The lynching was pure terror, to enforce the lie that not everyone in America is created equal,” he said.
Biden, whose many black men and women have held key positions throughout his administration, insisted that forms of racial terror continue in the United States, demonstrating the need for an anti-lynching law.
“Racial hatred is not a chronic problem – it is an ongoing problem,” Biden said. “Hate never goes away. It only hides. ,
Bobby Rush, D-Ill., the bill’s champion, makes it possible to prosecute a crime as lynching when conspiracy to commit a hate crime results in death or grievous bodily injury. The law provides for a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and a fine.
After unanimously approved by the Senate, the House approved Bill 422-3 on March 7, with eight members not voting. Rush introduced a bill in January 2019, but it stalled in the Senate after the House passed it by a 410-4 vote.
The NAACP began lobbying for anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s. A federal hate crime law was passed and signed into law in the 1990s, decades after the civil rights movement.
“Today we have gathered to do the unfinished business,” Harris said, “to acknowledge the horror and this part of our history, to explicitly state that lynching has always been a hate crime and to clarify that For that the federal government can now prosecute such crimes.”
“Lynching is not a relic of the past,” she said. “Racial acts of terror still happen in our country, and when they do, we should all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators accountable.”
By the time he was 14, he had traveled from his Chicago home to visit relatives in Mississippi in 1955, when it was alleged that he had whistled at a white woman. He was kidnapped, beaten and shot in the head. A large iron fan was tied around his neck with barbed wire and his body was thrown into the river. His mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open coffin at the funeral to show the cruelty he had committed.
Two white men, Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam, were charged, but acquitted by an all-white-male jury. Bryant and Milam later tell a reporter that they kidnapped and murdered Till.
During a video interview after the bill was signed, Parker credited current events for helping move the anti-lynching bill through Congress and onto Biden’s table. Parker specifically referred to the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, which sparked months of protests in the United States and other countries after videotapes of the officer’s actions were broadcast.
He drew a connection between Floyd and Till, saying, “That’s why Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat and it sparked the civil rights movement, because she thought of Emmett Till.”