Biden signs legislation named for Emmett Till making lynching a federal hate crime

Congress failed to pass anti-lynching legislation over 200 times.

A young boy holds a photograph of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched in 1955, at a vigil on the one year anniversary of the murder of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody, in Lynn, Massachusetts, May 25, 2021.

President Joe Biden has signed the Emmett Till Anti-lynching Act into law Tuesday, making lynching a hate crime under federal law.

"It was pure terror, to enforce the lie that not everyone -- not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal," Biden said. "Terror, to systematically undermine hard fought civil rights, terror, not just in the dark of night but in broad daylight. Innocent men, women and children, hung by nooses, from trees, bodies burned and drowned, castrated."

Congress failed to pass anti-lynching legislation over 200 times before the bill finally moved forward this year. The bill is the first legislation of its kind in more than 100 years to be signed into law.

Lynchings were used to murder and terrorize the Black community in the U.S., predominantly in the South, from the 1880s to 1960s, the NAACP states.

Of people who were killed in lynchings, Biden said: "Their crimes? Trying to vote, trying to go to school, trying to own a business, or preach the gospel."

The Equal Justice Initiative, a racial justice advocacy and research organization, has documented nearly 6,500 racial terror lynchings in the U.S. between 1865 and 1950.

Under the bill, an offense can be prosecuted as a lynching when the offender conspires to commit a hate crime that results in someone's death or serious bodily injury under this bill. This includes kidnapping and aggravated sexual abuse or an attempt to kidnap, abuse, or kill.