President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022, finishing a century-long odyssey for a bill that made lynching a hate crime despite resistance from conservative corners, CNN reports.
“Lynching was pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone … belongs in America, not everyone is created equal. Terror, to systematically undermine hard-fought civil rights,” President Joe Biden said at the Rose Garden signing ceremony. “Terror, not just in the dark of the night but in broad daylight. Innocent men, women and children hung by nooses in trees, bodies burned and drowned and castrated.”
Named after a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was brutally murdered and disfigured by a group of white men in Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman in 1955, the bill passed after Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul withdrew his objections that the bill’s definition of “lynching” was too broad.