‘Historic injustice’: Biden makes lynching a US hate crime

United States President Joe Biden has signed into law the first federal legislation that makes lynching a federal hate crime in the country after civil rights groups pushed for such a measure for more than a century.

About USA’s Emmett Till Anti lynching Act:

• The new law carries a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and fines for anyone conspiring to commit an act of lynching that causes death or injury.
• The new law, which will make lynching a federal offence, is the result of a century of efforts in the wake of incidents of lynching in which the victims were primarily African-Americans.
• The Bill notes that between 1882 and 1968, at least 4,700 people, predominantly African-Americans were reported lynched in the US and that 99 per cent of the perpetrators of these lynching were not punished.
• Yet, since 1918, of the more than 200 anti-lynching Bills introduced in the US Congress, none had been passed until the current legislation.

About lynching:

• Lynching is murder by a mob with no due process or rule of law.
• Across the US, thousands of people, mainly African Americans, were lynched by white mobs, often by hanging or torture, in the 19th and 20th Centuries.
• Some 4,400 African Americans were lynched between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.
• Those who participated in lynchings were often celebrated and acted with impunity.
• Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy.
• The first anti-lynching bill was introduced in 1900, by George Henry White, the only black man then serving in Congress. The bill failed and continued to fail for more than 120 years.