# Emmett Till Antilynching Act (2022) **Type:** Federal law (H.R. 55, 117th Congress; Public Law 117-107) **Signed:** March 29, 2022, by [[Joe Biden]] | **Sponsor:** Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL); Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) **Status:** Enacted; in effect ## Summary The federal law that finally made [[Lynching]] a federal hate crime — **104 years after the [[Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill]] was introduced** and after nearly 200 failed attempts between 1882 and 1968. Named for [[Emmett Till]], the 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955 whose open-casket funeral helped catalyze the civil rights movement. ## Key Provisions 1. Amends the federal hate-crime statute (building on the [[Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act]] framework) to define lynching as a **conspiracy to commit a hate crime** resulting in death or serious bodily injury, or involving kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, or attempt to kill 2. Maximum penalty of **30 years imprisonment**, a fine, or both 3. Extends culpability to **conspirators who plan** the violence, not just those who physically carry it out — the mob-accountability principle the [[Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill]] pioneered in 1918 4. Requires the attack to be carried out — planning without resulting injury or death is not covered ## Legislative History - **2018:** Predecessor (Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, Booker/Harris/Scott) passed the Senate unanimously but died in the House at the end of the 115th Congress - **February 2020:** First Emmett Till Antilynching Act passed the House 410–4; held in the Senate by [[Rand Paul]], who objected that the bill's threshold could federalize minor injuries - **February 28, 2022:** Revised bill (with a serious-bodily-injury standard, accommodating Paul's objection) passed the House **422–3** (Clyde, Massie, and Roy opposed) - **March 7, 2022:** Passed the Senate by **unanimous consent** — Booker sponsoring, with Paul and Tim Scott among the cosponsors - **March 29, 2022:** Signed into law ## Why It Matters for the KB The Act closes the longest-running legislative failure in American civil rights history, and the shape of its passage is itself the lesson: the same chamber whose [[Filibuster]] killed the [[Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill]] in 1922 — and every successor for a century — passed this version without objection, because the Southern bloc veto that made anti-lynching legislation unpassable had finally dissolved as a structural force. The 2005 Senate apology and the 2022 enactment bracket the institutional reckoning. Largely symbolic in practical terms (lynching deaths were already prosecutable under existing hate-crime and murder statutes), the law's significance is the formal federal acknowledgment that lynching was a distinct instrument of racial terror — the through-line documented at [[Lynching]]. ## Related - [[Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill]] — the 1918–1924 predecessor; start of the 104-year arc - [[Lynching]] — full history and legislative-failure timeline - [[Emmett Till]] — the 1955 lynching victim the Act is named for - [[NAACP]] — institutional engine of the century-long campaign