After 100 years of legislative failure, President Biden finally made lynching a federal hate crime.
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The long overdue Emmett Till Antilynching Act was signed into law by President Biden this past Tuesday. The act, named after one of the most well-known lynching victims, Emmett Till, now classifies the act of lynching as a federal hate crime.
Professor Ken Gonzales-Day, the Fletcher Jones chair in art at Scripps College dives into the immediate impact of the act in terms of the more recent spike in hate crimes.
KEN GONZALES-DAY: They’ve been trying to pass a law like that for 100 years, actually over a hundred years. So it’s amazing that it’s finally passed. And what’s great about it in terms of sentencing is that will be a federal law, so people will not be able to get out of sort of local state laws, which are which vary greatly across the nation.
Although lynching isn’t as widely seen as it used to be, it didn’t disappear completely. It has recently reappeared in different forms.
GONZALES-DAY: Modern day lynching is hard to define, but recent events like the Arbery killing would certainly qualify, and certainly in that case, there’s a court of law that has ruled that the killing was clearly illegal, so that might be a very good candidate for a modern day version.
Professor Terence Fitzgerald, an expert in the reproduction of racism in U.S. Society and racism and institutional oppression provides the extent of his definition.
TERENCE FITZGERALD: Lynching is classified under everything from the actual act of lynching, any physical act of terrorism, we can think of the victims in the past and even those in the future. Any sort of violence that is based on racial hatred.
Fitzgerald speaks on how it provides reassurance for him, personally.
FITZGERALD: It sends a signal it symbolizes to those for us as people of color that the law is on our side, that when things do happen. The law will take a harsh stance against this sort of violence.
Biden signed the bill into law after receiving unanimous support from the Senate. The bill makes the crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison. While there are still ways to go, we are one step closer to justice being served.