"To say that it took a hundred and twenty years for the American government to attack this crime! " Karen Bass, elected Democrat of California and president of the Congressional Black Caucus (representing the African-American elected members of the Congress), was not mistaken there. After more than a century of fruitless debate, the House of Representatives passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act on Wednesday, February 26, a bill under which lynchings, murders of blacks by whites, will now be considered "Hate crimes" at the federal level, while for a long time they were the subject of procedures only at local or state level.
The "Hate crimes" are a separate category of criminal offense in which victims have in common that they have been targeted because of their real or supposed belonging to a racial group or a religion, or because of their sexual identity or their disability. Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina, and Wyoming are the only states not to have passed hate crime laws: the main obstacle is the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity in the definition of these crimes, recalled Newsweek in August 2019.
The text was adopted by 410 votes in favor. Only independent politician Justin Amash from Michigan and three Republican politicians, Thomas Massie (Kentucky), Ted Yoho (Florida) and Louie Gohmert (Texas) voted against. Ted Yoho explained to a CNN reporter that with this bill the " federal government " according to him, trampled on the rights of States. This text follows a version adopted unanimously in the Senate in December 2018.
Tribute to Emmett Till
The bill makes direct reference to Emmett Till. The fate of this 14-year-old Illinois native, tortured and killed in 1955 by white Mississippi supremacists, has become one of the symbols of the struggle for civil rights in the United States. The release of a photo of his slaughtered body had shaken America and made it aware of the brutality and horror of racism. The main suspects in the crime, Roy Bryant and his half-brother J. W. Milam, were acquitted after a speedy trial.
"At least 4,742 people, mostly African-Americans, were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968", recalls the text adopted on Wednesday, noting that "99% of lynching perpetrators have escaped justice, at local or state level". According to the NGO Equal Justice Initiative, most of the lynchings took place in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Texas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, in Tennessee and Virginia.
"From Charlottesville to El Paso, we continue to face the same violent racism and hatred that claimed the lives of Emmett and many others"said Bobby Rush, a Democrat representative from Illinois who championed the text, referring to two racist killings in 2017 and 2019. "Its adoption will send a strong and clear message to the nation: we will not tolerate this fanaticism. "
The permanent threat of lynching has pushed millions of blacks to flee the South, a phenomenon called the "Great African-American Migration", radically changing the demographic geography of the United States. Like Emmett Till, whose mother fled Mississippi in the 1920s.
A century of discussions
"Most of the lynchings occurred between 1890 and 1900, but it is a symbolic vote", says Simon Grivet, historian of the United States and professor in Lille, specialist in the American judicial system. He recalls that as early as 1900, an elected official, the North Carolina republican George Henry White, the only black member of Congress, had proposed an anti-nachting bill. In vain. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP – "National Association for the Promotion of People of Color") then resumed the fight, supported by another elected Republican from Missouri, Leonidas C. Dyer. The latter sponsored an anti-nachting bill adopted by the House in 1922 but which was buried by elected Democrats of the Senate. In 1934, two elected Democrats, Robert F. Wagner and Edward P. Costigan, presented a new text, once again stopped in the Senate.
"Racial terrorism in the United States lasted until after the Second World War", continues Simon Grivet. And the lynchings did not end with the end of segregation (period between 1876 and 1965): in 1998, James Byrd Jr was assassinated by three white supremacists, two of whom were executed, in 2011 and 2019, the third having been sentenced to life. June 17, 2015, White supremacist commits mass murder in black Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine black parishioners in hopes of setting off "A war of races".
The Emmett Till Antilynching Act is now awaiting ratification by Donald Trump, campaigning for re-election, who has sought to woo the African American electorate. It remains to be seen whether these voters will have forgotten that in October, in one of his fits of fury on Twitter, he compared the dismissal procedure aimed at him to a "Lynching". Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican majority in the Senate, commented on the president's remarks: "Given the history of our country, I would not compare it to a lynching, it was an unfortunate choice of words. "
