He signed the bill into an office in the White House Rose Garden. Then he spoke. “Okay. It’s the law,” said the president, who was surrounded by Vice President Kamala Harris, members of Congress and top Justice Department officials. He was also accompanied by a descendant of Ida B. Wells, a black reporter , and the venerable Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin. Biden said it was “a bit unusual to sign the bill, say nothing and then speak. But that’s how we set it up. ” He thanked the audience of political rights leaders, members of the Black House Congress and other guests who continued to push for the law “never give up, never give up”. Congress first considered anti-lynching laws more than 120 years ago. By March of this year, he had failed to pass such legislation nearly 200 times, starting with a bill introduced in 1900 by North Carolina Representative George Henry White, the only black member of Congress at the time. Harris was the main sponsor of the bill when he was in the Senate. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act was named after the black teenager whose murder in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 marked a turning point in the civil rights era. His grieving mother insisted on an open coffin to show everyone how her son had been abused. “It’s been a long time,” said Parker, who was on stage with Biden when the president signed the bill. Parker, two years older than Till, was with his cousin at their relatives’ home in Mississippi and witnessed Till being abducted. In his remarks, Biden acknowledged the struggle for a law on books and talked about how lynchings were used to terrorize and intimidate blacks in the United States. More than 4,400 blacks died by lynching between 1877 and 1950, mostly in the South, he said. “The lynching was pure terror, to impose the lie that not everyone belongs, not everyone belongs to America, not everyone is equal,” he said. Biden, who has held many black men and women in key positions throughout his administration, said racial terrorism continued in the United States, demonstrating the need for an anti-lynching statute. “Racist hatred is not an old problem – it is a persistent problem,” Biden said. “Hatred never goes away. It just hides. “ The new law makes it possible to prosecute a crime as lynching when a conspiracy to commit hate crime leads to death or grievous bodily harm, according to Bill Defender Bobby Rush, D-Ill. The law provides for a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison and fines. Parliament approved bill 422-3 on March 7, with eight members abstaining after approving the Senate by unanimous consent. Rush had introduced a bill in January 2019, but was delayed in the Senate after Parliament approved it with 410-4 votes. The NAACP began pushing for anti-lynching laws in the 1920s. A federal hate crime law was passed and signed into law in the 1990s, decades after the civil rights movement. “Today we are focused on doing the unfinished business,” Harris said. he can now prosecute these crimes themselves. “ “Lynching is not a thing of the past,” he added. “Racist terrorist acts continue to happen in our nation and when they do, we must all have the courage to name them and hold the perpetrators accountable.” Till, 14, was traveling from his Chicago home to visit relatives in Mississippi in 1955 when he claimed he whistled at a white woman. He was abducted, beaten and shot in the head. A large metal fan was tied around his neck with wire mesh and his body was thrown into a river. His mother, Mamie Till, insisted on an open coffin at the funeral to show the barbarity she had suffered. Two white men, Roy Bryant and J.’s half-brother. B. Milam, were accused, but acquitted by sworn all-white men. Bryant and Milam later told a reporter that they kidnapped and killed Till. During a video interview after the bill was signed, Parker outlined the current events that helped the anti-lynching bill pass in Congress and Biden’s office. Parker specifically cited the killing of George Floyd by police in May 2020 by a Minneapolis police officer who sparked months of protests in the United States and other countries following the release of a video of the police action. He made a connection between Floyd and Till, saying: “This is what made Rosa Parks not give up her position and this sparked the civil rights movement because she was thinking of Emmett Till.”
