Booker, Harris, Scott’s “Justice for Victims of Lynching” bill moves forward in the senate

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

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Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

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October 18, 2018

By Natasha S. Alford, The Griot.Com

Senators Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Tim Scott’s bi-partisan bill moves forward in the Senate

Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ), Kamala Harris (D-CA) and Tim Scott (R-SC) saw their anti-lynching bill advance in the Senate on Thursday. (Getty Images)

It’s a bill that seems like common sense– name lynching as the racism it is and outlaw it.

But America has never successfully passed an anti-lynching bill at the federal level, thanks to political efforts to shut it down.

This Thursday, the “Justice for Victims of Lynching” bill advanced in the Senate, as a result of efforts from three Black Senators: Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and Republican Tim Scott.

The senators first introduced the bill in June, and at Thursday’s Senate Judiciary Committee meeting, it received unanimous support.

“From 1882 to 1986 there have been 200 attempts that have failed to get Congress to pass federal anti-lynching legislation, it’s time for that to change,” Senator Harris previously wrote.

According to Countable.US, the bill “would make lynching a federal crime that automatically warrants an enhanced sentence under existing federal hate crime statutes punishable by up to life imprisonment.”

It also recognizes the nearly 5,000 people who were lynched on U.S. soil between 1882 and 1968.

As recently as April 2018, two African-American men, Jarron Moreland and Alize Smith, were brutally killed, dismembered and chained to cinderblocks by their white neighbors, in an act considered by many to be a modern day lynching.

“This piece of legislation sends a message that together, as a nation, we condemn the actions of those that try to divide us with violence and hate,” said Sen. Scott…

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