Lynching has been made a federal hate crime in the US in groundbreaking new law

Huge change.

The US Congress has given approval which makes lynching a federal crime in the USA for the first time in history. The bill is now being sent on to President Joe Biden to sign into law. The Emmet Till Anti-Lynching Act has been years in the making and is among 200 bills that have been introduced over the last 100 years to ban lynching in America. The act is named after a black teenager who was killed in Mississippi in 1955 and his mother insisted o an open casket at his funeral to show the world what had been done to her child, marking a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said: "After more than 200 failed attempts to outlaw lynching, Congress is finally succeeding in taking a long overdue action by passing the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act." The bill will make it possible to prosecute a crime as a lynching when a conspiracy to commit a hate crime results in death or serious bodily injury, according to the bill’s champion, representative Bobby Rush. The maximum sentence under this new act is 30 years. The US house of representatives approved of a similar measure in 2020 with an overwhelming majority but it was blocked by the Senate. Last week the house approved a revisited version and the Senate passed the bill unanimously late on Monday. Rush said: “Lynching is a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy.” He added that the passing of this act "sends a clear and emphatic message that our nation will no longer ignore this shameful chapter of our history and that the full force of the US federal government will always be brought to bear against those who commit this heinous act”.