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Thankful to Illinois Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush for approval of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which finally passed in the House on Feb. 28, 2022. The bill was reintroduced by Rush as H.R. 55 for the 117th Congress, this time revised to include a serious bodily injury standard. The vote was 422-3, with Republican Reps. Andrew Clyde, Thomas Massie and Chip Roy voting against.
After more than a century of efforts by civil rights leaders to make lynching a federal crime, President Joe Biden on March 29, 2022, signed into law historic anti-lynching legislation. The signing of this legislation finally defined lynching as a federal hate crime, punishable by law, published in Death Penalty Information Center.
“Hundreds and hundreds of similar bills have failed to pass,” Biden said during the signing ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House. “Over the years, several federal hate crime laws were enacted, with federal laws to get approval for expressly prohibiting lynching. None. Until March 29, 2022, Women’s History Month.”
Rush said, “The enactment of my bill means that the full weight and power of the United States government can be brought to bear against those who commit this vicious crime. We will no longer face the question of if a perpetrator of lynching will be brought to justice — with the president’s signature today, we have eliminated that possibility moving forward.”
Advocates say there have been more than 200 attempts to pass the legislation in the past, and the latest effort had been in the works for nearly two years.
“This act of American terrorism has to be repudiated,” Rush, who sponsored the legislation nearly two years ago, told NPR. “Now it’s being repudiated. It’s never too late to repudiate evil and this lynching is an American evil.”
Let’s take a look at some of the history of lynching of African American women in America during Women’s History Month. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, has information on its website about the museum, which overlooks Montgomery, the state capital. It uses sculpture, art and design to give visitors a sense of the terror of lynching as they walk through a memorial square with 800 six-foot steel columns that symbolize the victims. The names of thousands of victims are engraved on columns — one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place. In Alabama alone, a reported total of 275 lynchings took place between 1871 and 1920.
Evelyn M. Simienb sought to tell the stories of these women and why they have been left out. Between 1880 and 1930, close to 200 women were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South, according to historian Cyrstal Feimster. Who knew this troubling history?
In a recent report, “Lynching in America,” researchers documented 4,075 lynchings of African Americans that were committed by Southern whites in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia between 1877 and 1950.
Lynching differed from ordinary murder or assault. It was celebrated by members of the Ku Klux Klan as a spectacular event and drew large crowds of people who tortured victims, burned them alive and dismembered them. Lynching was a form of domestic terrorism that inflicted harm onto individuals and upon an entire race of people, with the purpose of instilling fear.
The conventional approach to teaching the history of Jim Crow and lynching has focused almost exclusively on the Black male victim. However, such an approach often simplifies and distorts a much more complex history.
Not all victims were African American men, and although allegations of African American men raping white women were common, such allegations were not the leading motive for the lynching. We know from the pioneering work of anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett that African American men, women and even children were lynched for a range of alleged crimes and social infractions. Never again!
Lyndia Grant is a speaker/writer living in the D.C. area. Her radio show, “Think on These Things,” airs Fridays at 6 p.m. on 1340 AM (WYCB), a Radio One station. To reach Grant, visit her website, www.lyndiagrant.com, email lyndiagrantshowdc@gmail.com or call 240-602-6295. Follow her on Twitter @LyndiaGrant and on Facebook.