Kentucky Democrat Charles Booker appears on camera with a noose around his neck to condemn Republican U.S. Sen. Rand Paul for blocking anti-lynching legislation two years ago — a personally searing ad for a trailblazing Black candidate who says some of his own ancestors were lynched.
The new online ad — which comes with a warning about its content — shows a grisly photo of a lynching victim dangling from a tree. But it fails to mention that Paul co-sponsored a new version of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act that cleared Congress this year and was signed into law by President Joe Biden. The measure, named for the Black teenager whose 1955 killing in Mississippi became a galvanizing moment in the civil rights era, made lynching a federal hate crime.
