WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved legislation on Monday that would make lynching a federal hate crime and officially outlawed the brutal act that has come to symbolize the failure of Congress and the nation to address America’s history of racial violence.
Walkthrough bill against lynching, named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black teenager brutally tortured and murdered in Mississippi in 1955, came about after more than a century of failed attempts. Legislators estimate they have tried more than 200 times to take action that outright criminalizes the type of attack that has long terrorized black Americans. This bill was approved by 422 votes to 3 and was expected to pass the Senate, where it enjoys broad support.
“Today, the House of Representatives sent a strong message that our nation has finally come to terms with one of the darkest and most terrible times in our history and that we are morally and legally committed to changing course,” said Rep. Bobby L. Rush, Democrat from Illinois, who promised the law would become law before resigning at the end of his term.
In a statement, Mr. Rush, who was a civil rights leader and founded a chapter of the Black Panther Party in Illinois, recalled the first time he saw a photograph of Emmett’s battered body as an eight-year-old boy, an image that he said “shaped my mind as black man in America, changed the course of my life and changed our nation.”
Like other legislators who supported the bill, he referred to Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man who was shot dead in Georgia while jogging, calling his death a “modern-day lynching” and providing additional evidence that the Measure was urgently needed. A week ago, the jury found three white men from Georgia. guilty of a federal hate crime in connection with the murder of Mr. Arbery.
The measure, passed on Monday, would classify lynching as a federal hate crime, carrying penalties of up to 30 years in prison.
Democrats and Republicans alike hailed the action as historic. Representative Andy Biggs, an Arizona Republican and one of the most conservative members of the House of Representatives, demanded a recorded vote, stating that the positions of all members should be memorialized “for posterity and so that all Americans know and acknowledge that the House Representatives of the United States of Representatives may yet convene.”
“We can disagree on a lot of things,” said Mr. Biggs, who voted against confirming the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr. after the Jan. 6 riots at the Capitol. But the vote, he added, would show “that we can unite.”
Three Republicans—Representatives Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Thomas Massey of Kentucky, and Chip Roy of Texas—opposed the lynching bill.
The bill goes to the Senate, where the House officially apologized in 2005. for his inaction on the issue, including during the Jim Crow era when Southern senators successfully blocked efforts to consider it.
In 2018, three black senators – Corey Booker, Democrat from New Jersey; Tim Scott, Republican from South Carolina; and Kamala Harris from California – attempted to revive an attempt to make lynching a federal hate crime.. Legislation passed Senate in December 2018, just a few weeks before the close of Congress.
It resurfaced in the summer of 2020 amid a wave of racial justice protests following the killings of black men and women by white people and sparked a brawl on the Senate floor after Senator Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, objected to his quick passagecalling it too broad.
Mr. Paul said in a statement on Monday that he would support the measure that Mr. Booker and Mr. Scott re-introduced on Monday evening.
“I am delighted to have worked with Senators Booker and Scott to improve the end product and ensure that the language of this bill defines lynching as an absolutely heinous crime,” Mr. Paul said.
The vote in the House of Representatives took place on the last day of Black History Month, when House leaders also tried and failed to pass another bill to ban racial discrimination based on natural hair and hairstyles, including pigtails, curls and braids. The measure won bipartisan support but fell short of the two-thirds required to pass it through a special process reserved for consensus-based bills.
The measure that adopted by voice vote in 2020will argue that “racial and national discrimination can and does occur because of longstanding racial and national origin biases and stereotypes related to hair texture and style.”
Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a New Jersey Democrat and legislative champion, urged her colleagues to support him, saying “our natural hair is as much an innate black quality as the presence of melanin in our skin.”
“No one should sacrifice their time, money and hair health to meet racist standards of professionalism,” she added.
But most Republicans opposed the measure. Ohio State Representative Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, called it “unnecessary and redundant” given existing laws against discrimination.
Rep. Lauren Bobert, a Colorado Republican, reading aloud the proxy vote, derisively called the bill “the bad hair law.”
House Democrats vowed to re-introduce the bill in the normal way, allowing it to be passed by a simple majority.
It faces much tougher trials in the Senate, where it has no Republican sponsors and where it takes 60 votes to pass most laws.
Several states have passed similar billsincluding in New Jersey after a black high school wrestler had to cut his dreadlocks to complete. Monday Minnesota House passed his version with a bipartisan vote.