African American Senators Push First Federal Lynching Bill Through U.S. Senate
Style Magazine Newswire | 12/28/2018, 10:10 a.m.
Senator Kamala Harris /PHOTO: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
On December 19th, the U.S. Senate finally passed the first anti-lynching bill in history. The bill, entitled the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018, was passed by a voice vote. Should it become law it would federally criminalize lynching, attempts to lynch and lynching conspiracies. The legislation was introduced in June 2018 by the three African American members of the U.S. Senate: Senators Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), Tim Scott (R-SC) and Cory Booker (D-NJ). Murder by mob rule and with no due process, typically by hanging, was at its height in America in the late 1800s after the end of the Civil War. The end of slavery in America with the signing by President Abraham Lincoln of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1865, was met with a backlash that sought to enforce white supremacy and intimidate newly freed blacks by way of racial terrorism. Victims of lynching were often African Americans murdered at the hands of white mobs who would gather and photograph the proceedings and often create postcards of the victims.
