Reggie Jackson: Why The Emmett Till Antilynching Act Is Mostly Just Another Empty Gesture

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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.

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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.

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Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

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April 13, 2022

By Reggie Jackson, Milwaukee Independent

Nearly seventeen years ago my mentor Dr. James Cameron returned from a trip to the Senate chambers when they issued an apology for never passing an anti-lynching bill. As a lynching survivor and creator of America’s Black Holocaust Museum, he was center stage as the Senate did something to “make up” for never passing a federal law to make lynching a federal crime.

Many have celebrated the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, signed into law on March 29, 2022. I see no reason to celebrate a law that is one hundred years late and is not an anti-lynching bill, despite the name.

The law simply makes what Congress calls “lynching” a federal hate crime. They don’t define lynching in the bill. It’s called an anti-lynching bill but the words of the bill simply amend Section 249(a) of title 18, United States Code, which is the legislation about federal hate crimes.

This bill, 17 years after the Senate “apology” in 2005, is a sign of the failures of that body to do the right thing in a timely manner. No apology or fake anti-lynching bill will make up for the inaction by multiple Congress’s and multiple Presidents to protect Black people from White mob violence.

Read the full story here.

Learn more about the horrible history of lynching here.

More Breaking News here.

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