US President Joe Biden on Tuesday eveningput my signature under a law that criminalizes lynching, the killing or serious injury of a person for hateful reasons, in the United States. The first bill to classify lynching as a crime was introduced in 1900, but in the time that followed the law was defeated more than two hundred times in Congress. At the beginning of March, the Senate and the House of Representatives agreed by a large majority.
The law now passed is named after the black American Emmett Till, who was murdered in 1955 at the age of 14 for allegedly whistling after a white woman. A jury, consisting entirely of white people, acquitted two white men at the time. The duo later confessed to killing the boy. The murder sparked anger among the American population and helped fuel the American civil rights movement.
At the signing, Biden reflected extensively on the racial violence that black Americans have experienced and continue to experience. He called the lynching “pure terror,” which was used to “spread the lie that not everyone should belong in the US and be born equal.” The atrocity would “systematically undermine hard-won human rights.” Black people were punished for their skin color, Biden said, quoted by CNN†
‘Not something of the past’
While lynching perpetrators in recent history could also be punished for murder or attempted murder, Biden says the new law is more than just symbolic. “This is not just a thing of the past. Racial hatred is not a historical problem, it is a persistent problem,” said the US president, who referred to, among other things, the black man Ahmaud Arbery, who was murdered out of hatred in 2020 and the multi-day rally of far-right white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017, among other things. in which a woman was killed when a car rammed into a group of counter-protesters.
In the past, lynching has mainly taken place in the segregated southern part of the US. According to dates of Tuskegee University, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968, including 3,446 black people. In the future, perpetrators of lynchings could receive a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison.
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