WASHINGTON (CN) – It took more than 100 years but the House of Representatives voted Wednesday to finally make lynching, a barbaric tool of social and racial control, a federal hate crime.
Named in honor of the 14-year-old boy whose brutal 1955 murder sparked the Civil Rights Movement in America, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, or H.R. 35, is the first legislation of its kind to vault through the House.
“Lynching, plain and simple, is an American evil, and this atrocity is comparable to France’s use of the guillotine, the Roman Empire’s use of crucifixion, and the British use of drawing and quartering as a tool of terrorism,” Representative Bobby Rush, the bill’s lead sponsor, said from the floor of the House this afternoon. “For too long federal law has remained conspicuously silent.”
With 410 votes in favor, only four lawmakers voted against the measure: Representatives Louie Gohmert of Texas, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Ted Yoho of Florida, all Republicans, and Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, who is Independent.
“I voted against H.R. 35 because the Constitution specifies only a handful of federal crimes and leaves the rest to individual states to prosecute,” Massie said. “In addition, this bill expands current federal ‘hate crime’ laws. A crime is a crime, and all victims deserve equal justice. Adding enhanced penalties for ‘hate’ tends to endanger other liberties such as freedom of speech."
Yoho similarly told reporters following the vote that he voted against the measure because it was an overreach by the federal government.
Gohmert and Amash did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Congress has seen antilynching bills come up for consideration roughly 200 times since 1900 when the only black member of Congress serving, Representative George Henry White of North Carolina, put forward a petition that would outlaw lynching “by gangs of irresponsible and wickedly disposed persons.”
The petition never got out of committee, and it would be 22 more years — with lynching occurring all the while — before then Missouri Representative Leonidas Dyer leveraged a similar bill to the House floor for a vote. It failed after a fierce bit of filibustering by opponents who argued that the bill would infringe states’ rights.
New life was breathed into antilynching measures just two years ago when the Senate passed the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act. Lacking the teeth of Rush’s resolution, however, that bill did not explicitly codify lynching as a hate crime, asserting only that lynching is a deprivation of one’s civil rights.
With the 2018 language incorporated into the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is fully expected to pass the measure before the end of the week, Rush said Wednesday. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill into law by Saturday.
When asked at a press conference Wednesday whether she believed Trump would follow through, California Representative Karen Bass remarked: “How could he not?”
Lynching has brutally cut short the lives of thousands of people over the last 120 years. The recorded total of those lynched between 1882 and 1968, according to the Tuskegee Institute, is 4,743 people.
Of that total, 72% of the victims were black. Whites who died by lynching tended to be those who had come to the defense of those targeted by the racist mob.
