Emmett Till Antilynching Act Passes House Judiciary Committee

CHICAGO — The Emmett Till Antilynching Act on Wednesday passed the House Judiciary Committee for the second time — earlier this week, federal law enforcement officials closed their investigation into the Chicago teenager's 1955 lynching, also for the second time.

Introduced by Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush, the bill would for the first time designate lynching as a federal crime, as more than 200 other bills have tried and failed to do since 1900. The latest attempt was last year, when the same bill passed the House 410-4, but was blocked in the Senate by just one senator — Kentucky's Rand Paul.

Paul at the time said the bill was too broad and would result in too severe punishments for lynchings that don't result in "serious bodily injury."

Rush reintroduced the act on the first day of the latest Congress. It passed the Judiciary Committee by a voice vote and will now go to the House floor. Thanks to the legislative filibuster requiring a supermajority of 60 votes to pass most bills, its fate in the Senate remains unclear.

"I was eight years old when my mother put the photograph of Emmett Till’s brutalized body in Jet Magazine on our living room coffee table, pointed to it, and told us, ‘this is why I brought my boys out of Albany, Georgia,'" Rush said in a statement. "That photograph shaped my consciousness as a Black man in America and changed the course of my life. And it changed our nation."

Rush called Mamie Till-Mobley's decision to hold an open-casket funeral for her son a "catalyst for the civil rights movement."

"It exposed our nation to the brutal truth and terror of racism in America and put us on the path to becoming a more equal nation," Rush continued.

In December 1955, Carolyn Bryant Donham, a white shopkeeper, accused Till of whistling at her at a small Mississippi grocery store. Bryant's husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, later abducted Till, tortured him to death, and dumped his mangled body in the Tallahatchie River.

An all-white jury found the men not guilty. Safe from prosecution, they admitted to Look Magazine in 1956 that they had brutally beaten Till before ordering him to undress, shooting him, lashing his body to a heavy metal fan with barbed wire and rolling him into the river.

The Justice Department has twice reopened their investigation into Till's death, once in 2004 and again in 2017. In the first case, federal officials determined the statute of limitations had run out for federal charges, and a Mississippi Grand Jury declined to bring state charges. In the second case, opened after Donham was accused of lying to the FBI about Till's sexual advances, federal officials determined there was insufficient evidence to prove she lied under oath.

Both Bryant and Milam lived into their 60s, never having faced any consequences for the murder. Donham is in her 80s and lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Nearly 6,500 Americans were lynched between 1865 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. Rush said his bill would "begin the process of closing this shameful chapter of our history."

"It has been more than 120 years since the first antilynching bill was introduced in Congress. Despite nearly 200 attempts since then to codify lynching as a federal crime, it has never been done. The Emmett Till Antilynching Act would correct this historical injustice and ensure that the full force of the United States federal government is always brought to prosecute those who commit the monstrous act of lynching," Rush continued, adding that he looks forward to a floor vote on the bill.