US President Joe Biden Signs Anti-Lynching Bill

Washington,D.C: The law follows more than 100 years and 200 failed attempts by US lawmakers to pass anti-lynching legislation.

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act is named for the black teenager whose brutal murder in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.

Perpetrators of a lynching – death or injury resulting from a hate crime – will face up to 30 years in jail.

Mr Biden said: “Thank you for never giving up, never ever giving up.

“Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone, not everyone, belongs in America, not everyone is created equal.”

He added: “Racial hate isn’t an old problem – it’s a persistent problem. Hate never goes away. It only hides.”

The bill was passed by the Senate overwhelmingly earlier this month. Last month, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved the bill. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Chip Roy of Texas, and Andrew Clyde of Georgia were the three Republicans who voted no. They said that lynching people was already a hate crime in the United States.

Lynching is the act of a mob killing someone without due process or the rule of law. Thousands of people, mostly African Americans, were lynched by white mobs across the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, frequently by hanging or torture.

“Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy,” the bill’s sponsor, Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush, said ahead of its passage.

Following the police officer’s death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, the House passed an earlier version of the bill, but it was blocked in the Senate.

Many racial justice activists have called Floyd’s death, as well as that of Ahmaud Arbery, who was hunted down and shot by three white men in Georgia in 2020, “modern-day lynchings.”