For the first time in history, lynching would be considered a federal hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison under legislation passed by the House of Representatives.
Lawmakers on Monday voted 422-3 to approve the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which would allow a crime to be prosecuted as a lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime results in death or serious bodily injury.
"The House has sent a resounding message that our nation is finally reckoning with one of the darkest and most horrific periods of our history, and that we are morally and legally committed to changing course," Representative Bobby Rush, who introduced the bill, said in a statement.
Rush, a Democrat from Illinois, said there have been more than 200 attempts to codify lynching as a federal crime since 1900, but all have failed. He cited a report from the Equal Justice Initiative that found more than 6,500 Americans were lynched between 1865 and 1950.
"The failure of Congress to codify federal antilynching legislation... meant that 99 percent of lynching perpetrators walked free. Today, we take a meaningful step toward correcting this historical injustice," he added.
The bill is named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American boy from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white woman. He was kidnapped, beaten and murdered by two white men. Days later his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River.
Till's mother, Mamie, had an open-casket viewing of her son's body and was quoted as saying that she wanted the world to see what they had done to her child.
Till's lynching is widely considered to have spawned the emerging civil rights movement. His death is something that stuck with Rush his entire life.
"I was eight years old when my mother put the photograph of Emmett Till’s brutalized body that ran in Jet magazine on our living room coffee table," he said. "That photograph shaped my consciousness as a Black man in America, changed the course of my life, and changed our nation."
Rush continued to say that "modern-day lynchings like the murder of Ahmaud Arbery make abundantly clear that the racist hatred and terror that fueled the lynching of Emmett Till are far too prevalent in America to this day."
Republican Representatives Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Chip Roy of Texas voted against the legislation. The bill now goes to the Senate for consideration.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged senators to take up the legislation immediately and send the bill to the president's desk, noting that "hateful attacks are not yet a relic of the past."
"Any act of bigoted violence is an attack on the most basic promise of American Democracy: 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.' House Democrats will not rest until we guarantee these inalienable rights for every American," she said in a statement.
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