It Only Took 122 Years, But The Senate Finally Passes An Anti-Lynching Bill

The Senate filibuster rule has been used to kill anti-lynching laws for over a century. Congress has failed to pass anti-lynching legislation nearly 200 times, starting with a bill introduced in 1900 by North Carolina Rep. George Henry White, the only black member of Congress at the time. A brief history:

Congress began introducing legislation mentioning lynching as early as 1901, but it wasn’t until 1922 that an anti-lynching bill passed in the House of Representatives.

That bill was the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, first introduced in 1918 by Congressman Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican from Missouri. Senate Dixiecrats filibustered the bill in 1922, 1923 and 1924, preventing it from ever coming to a vote in their chamber.

The anti-lynching crusade continued into the Great Depression with the support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. However, her husband did not share her mission. Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt claimed that southerners in his party would filibuster New Deal legislation to death if he supported an anti-lynching law.

Whether this was true or not is debatable, since there were already plenty of filibusters against New Deal bills (often, these filibusters were meant to force an amendment to the bill in question or force action on another bill, rather than kill legislation outright). In any case, Senate Democrats used the filibuster to kill the Costigan-Wagner Anti-Lynching Bill introduced in 1934; and in 1938, they killed the Wagner-Van Nuys Anti-Lynching Bill with a 30-day filibuster.

Skipping over a lot of history, fast-forwarding to as recently as 2020. Anti-lynching bill stalls in Senate as emotions run high (excerpt):

The Senate unanimously passed virtually identical legislation last year. The House then passed it by a sweeping 410-4 vote in February but renamed the legislation for Emmett Till — the sole change that returned the measure to the Senate.

Sen. Rand Paul — who is single-handedly holding up the bill despite letting it pass last year — sought changes to the legislation as a condition of allowing it to pass.

The debate occurred as a memorial service was taking place for George Floyd, a Minneapolis man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes, sparking the protests that have convulsed the nation.

Paul, who has a history of rankling colleagues by slowing down bills, said the legislation was drafted too broadly and could define minor assaults as lynching. He also noted that murdering someone because of their race is already a hate crime. He said the Senate should make other reforms, such as easing “qualified immunity” rules that shield police officers from being sued.

“Rather than consider a good-intentioned but symbolic bill, the Senate could immediately consider addressing qualified immunity and ending police militarization,” Paul said. He sought to offer an amendment to weaken the measure, and Sen. Corey Booker blocked it.

“Tell me another time when 500-plus Congress people, Democrats, Republicans, House members and senators come together in a chorus of conviction and say, ‘Now is the time in America that we condemn the dark history of our past and actually pass anti-lynching legislation,’” Booker said.

H.R.35, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, died in the Senate thanks to Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell.

But now Democrats are in back in charge of the Senate, and in a historic first, the Senate unanimously passes anti-lynching bill after century of failure:

The Senate on Monday unanimously passed legislation that would make lynching a federal hate crime, in a historic first that comes after more than a century of failed efforts to pass such a measure.

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which was introduced by Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D-Ill.) in the House and Sens. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in the Senate, now goes to President Biden for his signature.

It is named for the 14-year-old Black boy whose brutal torture and murder in Mississippi in 1955 sparked the civil rights movement.

Booker said in a tweet Monday night that he was “overjoyed” by the legislation’s passage.

“The time is past due to reckon with this dark chapter in our history and I’m proud of the bipartisan support to pass this important piece of legislation,” he said.

In a statement, Rush called lynching “a long-standing and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy.”

“Perpetrators of lynching got away with murder time and time again — in most cases, they were never even brought to trial. … Today, we correct this historic and abhorrent injustice,” he said.

The legislation would amend the U.S. Code to designate lynching a hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison. More than 4,000 people, mostly African Americans, were reported lynched in the United States from 1882 to 1968, in all but a handful of states. Ninety-nine percent of perpetrators escaped state or local punishment, according to Rush’s office.

The National Memorial For Peace And Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, opened to the public on April 26, 2018. The memorial structure on the center of the site is constructed of over 800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. The names of the lynching victims are engraved on the columns.

Work on the memorial began in 2010 when EJI staff began investigating thousands of racial terror lynchings in the American South, many of which had never been documented. EJI was interested not only in lynching incidents, but in understanding the terror and trauma this sanctioned violence against the Black community created. Six million Black people fled the South as refugees and exiles as a result of these “racial terror lynchings.”

This research ultimately produced Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror in 2015 which documented thousands of racial terror lynchings in 12 states. Since the report’s release, EJI has supplemented its original research by documenting racial terror lynchings in states outside the Deep South.

The House last month approved the bill on a bipartisan 410-to-3 vote after an often-emotional debate.

Throughout history, lawmakers tried, and failed, to pass anti-lynching bills nearly 200 times. The earliest such attempt came in 1900, when Rep. George Henry White (R-N.C.), then the country’s only Black member of Congress, stood on the floor of the House and read the text of his unprecedented measure, which would have prosecuted lynchings at the federal level. The bill later died in committee.

Years later, Rep. Leonidas C. Dyer (R-Mo.) introduced an anti-lynching bill that passed the House but was filibustered in the Senate by Southern Democrats, many of whom opposed it in the name of “states’ rights.”

In floor remarks Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) hailed the measure’s passage but described Congress’s long delay in passing anti-lynching legislation as “a bitter stain on America.”

“While this will not erase the horrific injustices to which tens of thousands of African Americans have been subjected over the generations — nor fully heal the terror inflicted on countless others — it is an important step forward as we continue the work of confronting our nation’s past in pursuit of a brighter and more just future,” Schumer said.

In 2020, the House passed an earlier version of Rush’s legislation on an overwhelming bipartisan vote. But Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) objected to the measure’s unanimous passage in the Senate that year, saying that he feared the bill might “conflate lesser crimes with lynching” and that it would allow enhanced penalties for altercations that resulted in only “minor bruising.”

In a change from the 2020 measure, the latest version includes the words “death or serious bodily injury.” Paul said last month he had joined with Booker and Scott to rework the legislation and was satisfied with the changes.

Last month, Rush announced his retirement from Congress at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, the Chicago church that was the site of Till’s 1955 funeral. In his statement Monday night, the longtime lawmaker and civil rights activist said he looks forward to Biden signing the bill into law “very, very soon.”

“At this moment, I am reminded of Dr. King’s famous words: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,’” Rush said.