By Mihir Zaveri
The Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a bill that would, for the first time, explicitly make lynching a federal crime.
“For
over a century, members of Congress have attempted to pass some version
of a bill that would recognize lynching for what it is: a
bias-motivated act of terror,” Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey
Democrat who introduced the bill, said in a statement. “Today, we have righted that wrong and taken corrective action that recognizes this stain on our country’s history.”
More
than 4,700 people, the vast majority of them black, were lynched in the
United States between 1882 and 1968, according to the N.A.A.C.P.
Perpetrators were rarely prosecuted. Congress has tried and failed some
200 times to pass similar anti-lynching legislation since 1882,
according to the bill.
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Source: The New York Times
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