Here's a closer look at what's behind the new federal anti-lynching law.
President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed into law the first bill that specifies lynching as a federal hate crime. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which Congress passed on March 7, enables the prosecution of crimes as lynchings if they are done during a hate crime in which the victim is injured or slain.
“Today, I am thinking of Emmett Till and the countless other victims of this brutal crime whose names we do not know. Emmett Till would have been 80 years old today," Rush said in a statement. “His lynching ignited the civil rights movement and a generation of civil rights activists. It had a ripple effect that we still feel today; it began a movement to reckon with freedom, justice, and equality all around the world.
The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is “clearly symbolic,” in addition to having teeth, said Damon T. Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. —In 1998, James Byrd, Jr., a Black man, was dragged to his death behind a pickup truck near Jasper, Texas, by white men. An avowed racist was executed in 2019 for Byrd's killing. John William King had a tattoo on his body of a Black man with a noose around his neck hanging from a tree, according to authorities.Congress first considered anti-lynching legislation more than 120 years ago.