WASHINGTON DC —
US President Joe Biden on
Tuesday signed into law a bill finally making racist lynchings a federal hate
crime, ending more than a century of delays in outlawing the symbol of what he
called “pure terror”.
اضافة اعلان
Anyone convicted under the new law will face up to
30 years in prison, ending a history of impunity over what researchers say were
thousands of lynchings — often unpunished — between the end of the Civil War in
1865 and 1950.
The bill is named after
Emmett Till, a 14-year old
African American whose brutal murder galvanized the US civil rights movement in
the 1950s.
Biden was joined at the Rose Garden ceremony by Vice
President
Kamala Harris, the first Black woman in the post, and Michelle
Duster, the great-granddaughter of pioneering Black journalist and
anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells.
“Lynching was pure terror,” Biden said, recounting
the horrific practice of public vigilante killings of mostly
Black Americans,
often in front of enthusiastic white crowds in the post-slavery US.
Biden, however, warned that “racial hate isn’t an
old problem. It’s a persistent problem” and that “hate never goes away, it only
hides.”
And Harris warned that “lynching is not a relic of
the past.”
“Racial acts of terror still occur in our nation,”
she said.
The Senate unanimously passed the bill earlier this
month, with Democratic Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer saying that the
long delay in agreeing on a federal measure had been “a stain on America.”
Till was abducted and murdered in August 1955 while
visiting relatives in the southern state of Mississippi. The boy’s mutilated
body was found three days later in a local river.
This came days after a white woman, Carolyn Bryant,
alleged that he had propositioned her in a store and touched her on the arm,
hand, and waist.
Two white Mississippi men, Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant’s
husband, and J.W. Milam, his half-brother, were charged with murder but
acquitted by an all-white jury. The pair later admitted in a magazine interview
that they had killed the boy.
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