EXPLAINER: What's behind federal anti-lynching legislation?

President Joe Biden is expected to sign into law the first bill that specifies lynching as a federal hate crime. The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, which Congress passed on March 7, enables the prosecution of crimes as lynchings if they are done during a hate crime in which the victim is injured or slain.

A 2020 version of the bill set the maximum sentence as 10 years. The one Biden will sign comes with 30 years in prison and fines for anyone conspiring to commit an act of lynching that causes death or injury.

The House approved the bill 422-3 with eight members not voting. The Senate passed the bill by unanimous consent. Illinois Democratic Rep. Bobby Rush introduced this version in January 2021. He had introduced a bill as well in January 2019 and the House passed the bill 410-4, but that one stalled in the Senate.

“Lynching has always been a terrorist weapon in the hands of racists in the history of our nation," Rush said in an interview earlier this year. Just as important, he added, is that it remains so — a continuing weapon to “promote racialized terror."

Here is a deeper look at the bill.

WHY DOES IT MATTER?

In 2015, the Equal Justice Initiative issued a report that detailed more than 4,400 documented racial terror lynchings of Black people in America between 1877 and 1950.

The Montgomery, Alabama-based nonprofit later reported that during the 12-year period of Reconstruction following the U.S. Civil War, at least 2,000 Black women, men and children were victims of lynchings.

The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is “clearly symbolic,” in addition to having teeth, said Damon T. Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“No doubt about that, especially given the long road it’s taken to have any federal...