It took 120 years and nearly 5,000 innocent deaths, but Congress finally acknowledged the nation’s inexcusable past by approving legislation to make lynching a hate crime under federal law.
The shame of taking more than a century to classify one of the most barbaric acts of hatred as a federal crime remains a stain on the legislative process, but the Emmett Till Antilynching Act at least takes a stand against future instances of bigotry and racial violence.
Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., who introduced the bill, said it would belatedly bring justice for Emmett Till and the thousands of other lynching victims.
Emmett, a black 14-year-old, was brutally tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955, supposedly for whistling at a white woman in a grocery store. His death shocked the nation and helped drive the growing civil rights movement.
Despite the moral outrage, Congress remained steadfastly opposed to classifying lynchings as federal crimes. The rationale from opponents, largely from Southern states, was that such crimes were matters for the state to handle, not the federal government.
There’s no small measure of contemptible hypocrisy to be found there, considering that lynchings largely went unprosecuted in the South for decades. From 1882 to 1968, 4,743 people were lynched in the United States, of which 3,446 were black, according to statistics compiled by the NAACP. Many of the nearly 1,300 white people who were lynched died because they had the audacity to help a black person or because they took a moral stand against lynchings.
The first effort at federal anti-lynching legislation came in 1900 under a proposal from North Carolina Republican Rep. George Henry White, the lone black member of Congress. The bill failed, as would some 200 similar proposals over the next 12 decades. Even while Congress found the will to pass the Civil Rights Act, the anti-lynching bills stalled, falling victim to the debate over whether the states or federal government should have jurisdiction in such crimes.
While lawmakers debated, the lynchings went on, often viewed as community gatherings, a spectacle to be seen and photographed. Archived photos show black men hanging from trees, or their bodies being burned, often with crowds of white people standing by and smiling for the camera.
The anti-lynching legislation passed nearly unanimously in the House, as did similar legislation last year in the Senate. Though largely symbolic — the last recorded lynching in the United States took place in 1981 — it represents a long-overdue tribute to those who were killed not for a crime, but for the color of their skin.
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., in urging the passage of the bill, said: “It’s never too late to do the right thing and address these gruesome, racially motivated acts of terror that have plagued our nation’s history.”
He’s right, but shame on us as a nation for taking so long to do the right thing.
First Published: March 11, 2020, 10:00 a.m.
