US Finally Passes Anti Lynching Law (In English) – Free PDF Download

The News

• US President Joe Biden has signed legislation that designates lynching as a federal hate crime.
• The law follows more than 100 years and 200 failed attempts by US lawmakers to pass anti-lynching legislation.
• The law is called the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act.
• Now, Perpetrators of a lynching – death or injury resulting from a hate crime – will face up to 30 years in jail.

USA & History of 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.
• Between 1901 and 1929, more than 1,200 African Americans were lynched in the South. Forty-one percent of these lynchings occurred in two exceptionally violent states: Georgia (250) and Mississippi (245).
• 99% of those who participated in lynchings were not punished & were often celebrated and acted with impunity. There are also several recent examples where many activists have described the murders of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia as modern-day lynching.

Then why no law against lynching?

• 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.
• In 1918, Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill was introduced in the 65th United States Congress by Representative Leonidas C. Dyer. It passed in house of representatives but failed in senate due to filibuster by southern democrats.
• Later in the 1920s, the US-based civil rights organisation National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) attempted to pass an anti-lynching Bill, which ultimately led to a federal hate crime legislation being passed.
• The current act amends the existing federal criminal code, created by the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law in 2009.

Emett Till Anti lynching act

Why Emett Till Act?

• In the summer of 1955, the 14-year-old Till was far from home when his life ended in a most violent way, apparently for whistling at a white woman.
• Dragged from his bed at his uncle’s home in a small Mississippi town, he was beaten so badly that his face was unrecognisable when the corpse was recovered from the river three days later. He had been shot in the head and his body tied to a 32kg fan.
• The two men known locally to have carried out the attack were acquitted of murder. The following year, they admitted responsibility in a magazine interview, but said they had done nothing wrong.

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