President Joe Biden signed a bill Tuesday making lynching a federal hate crime after more than a century of unsuccessful efforts in Congress.
Biden, standing alongside Vice President Kamala Harris, who co-sponsored the legislation as a senator, celebrated its enactment with a signing ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House.
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“Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal,” Biden said. “Innocent men, women, and children hung by nooses from trees, bodies burned and drowned and castrated. Their crimes? Trying to vote, trying to preach the gospel — false accusations of murder, arson, and robbery. Simply being black.”
The legislation, titled the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, passed the House 422-3 in February. It cleared the Senate by unanimous consent one week later.
The law, which makes lynching punishable by up to 30 years in prison, is named after Emmett Till, a black child beaten and killed in Mississippi in 1955. More than 4,700 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, according to the NAACP’s records, and there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of black men and teenagers in Mississippi alone since 2000, the Washington Post reported last year, citing court documents and police reports.
Biden invited members of the Till family to attend the ceremony, praising their “courage to find purpose” through their pain. But he said the law is not just about the racial violence of the past, mentioning Ahmaud Arbery, the black man chased down and murdered while jogging through a Georgia neighborhood in 2020, and the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.
“From the bullets in the back of Ahmaud Arbery to countless other acts of violence, countless victims known and unknown, the same racial hatred that drove the mob to hang a noose brought that mob carrying torches out of the fields of Charlottesville just a few years ago,” Biden said. “Racial hate isn’t an old problem — it’s a persistent problem.”
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The bill had previously passed the House in 2020 but was ultimately held up in the Senate by Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul, who argued the legislation would “cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion.” He proposed a “serious bodily injury” standard that the next Congress included when reintroducing the bill in 2021.
Illinois Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush sponsored the legislation in the House, with a companion bill by Sens. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, and Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican, in the upper chamber.
