Black leaders, social justice advocates and others lauded this week’s passage of long-awaited federal legislation making lynching a federal hate crime. But some said more needs to be done.
“I think it’s important to ensure that we put this legislation in place and that it’s enforced,” said Rashad Robinson, president of Color of Change, an online-focused civil rights group. “At the same time, it’s important that we continue to work to deal with all the ways that anti-Black racism shows up, fromto the ways in which our votes and ability to express ourselves in a democracy are being stolen.
Janai Nelson, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, said the law’s passage marked the government’s “first real steps” toward acknowledging widespread lynching. “This was long overdue and something that should have been settled many years ago,” he said. “The wheels of administration turn slowly.”
And they weren’t always meant to affect just the person killed, but to terrorize a larger community – a distinction that the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act makes clear. “When I think of what this means — that we can finally provide justice for the victims of this heinous act; that we will be able to reckon with our nation’s legacy of lynching; and that we will, once and for all, send a strong message that we will not stand for these abhorrent crimes — I am elated,” Rush said in a statement.
“It’s a victory for all the people who died,” Luckett said. “It’s also an opportunity to hold people accountable for the continued racialized violence in our country.”
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