WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till anti-lynching bill on Tuesday, invoking, during a Rose Garden ceremony, the lives of the Chicago youth whose lynching helped spur the modern civil rights movement and Ida B. Wells, the Chicago journalist who crusaded against lynching in the years after the Civil War.
The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, championed for years by Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., whose district sweeps in parts of Chicago’s South Side, defines lynching as a federal hate crime for the first time.
