It’s truly amazing — and baffling — that it took more than a century for Congress to pass an anti-lynching bill into law, but that was the sad case in the United States. When President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in late March 2022, it marked the end of more than 200 unsuccessful attempts through the years to pass such legislation.
The initial anti-lynching legislation was introduced way back in 1900 by George Henry White, who was the only black man in Congress at the time. The significance of the legislation was apparent then and only became more so as the decades flew by.
Between 1877 and 1950, an estimated 4,400 black people were lynched in America, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery, Ala.-based nonprofit that represents prisoners who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes and to rectify the circumstances for those who were denied a fair trial.

The 2022 passage was unanimous in the Senate, and in the House, three Republicans voted against the bill: Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Chip Roy of Texas. They claimed lynching was already a hate crime.
To get a sense of what some of the vitriol was like in the 19th century, it’s instructive to look at a number of letters to the editor back in the day, as my forthcoming book, “Still Trending: A Divided America from Newspaper to Newsfeed,” does.
Fully one-fourth of lynchings were the result of accusations that a black man had sexually assaulted a white woman. The accusation alone often led to a lynching.
On Aug. 25, 1906, the Atlanta Georgian newspaper ran a full page of more than a dozen letters in support of its editorial that called for “personal mutilation” of “every negro who commits this crime (sexual assault).”
One letter, from someone named B.A. Pugin, concluded:
“ … Your idea of personal mutilation is good, but it comes too late. Let’s continue to kill all negroes who commit the unmentionable crime, and make eunuchs of all the new male issues before they are eight days old.”
That letter from almost 120 years ago certainly gives some context to the long-standing need for the anti-lynching legislation that finally came to be in 2022.
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