The US Senate unanimously approved a bill on Monday that will make lynchings a federal hate crime, after more than a century of failed attempts to pass a similar measure.
The measure, which was previously approved by the Lower House and only needs the signature of President Joe Biden to become law, is an attempt to remember history and condemn a form of racist murder that killed hundreds of African Americans during more than a century.
“The fact that this took us so long is a bitter stain on America,” Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote.
The bill, which will surely receive the support of Biden, will punish lynchings, which are murders without due process, often by a mob, which in the US were linked to hatred, with up to 30 years in prison. to African Americans.
Such racist executions of black people were common in the south of the country during the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, and decreased in frequency after the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
The word is associated in the collective imagination with African-Americans hanging from trees, and it is estimated that more than 4,700 people died in lynchings between 1882 and 1968, including 3,446 blacks, according to the Tuskegee Institute.
While some historians say there haven’t been any notable lynchings for four decades, others disagree, applying that label to cases like Ahmaud Arbery, shot to death in 2020 while exercising in Georgia.
Earlier this year, three white men were sentenced to life in prison and later found guilty of committing a hate crime for the murder of African-American Arbery, which caused a stir in the midst of a wave of protests against racism and police brutality.
The newly passed bill is named after Emmett Till, whose 14-year-old lynching after being kidnapped and tortured by white men in Mississippi in 1955 is one of the most brutal episodes in the nation’s racial history.
In 1900, then-only black U.S. Congressman George Henry White introduced the first bill to criminalize lynching, which failed, as did nearly 200 other attempts over the next 121 years.
The prison sentences contained in the law approved this Monday will be applied in cases of “death or serious bodily injury” as a result of a racist-motivated aggression.
