More than a century after such legislation was first introduced, President Joe Biden has signed into law a bill to make lynching a federal hate crime, condemning the “pure terror to enforce the lie that not everyone belongs in America, not everyone is created equal.”
The president signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act – named after the Black teenager whose murder in 1955 reflected Jim Crow-era violence that galvanised the Civil Rights movement – at a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden surrounded by civil rights advocates and Black legislators.
