Historic anti-lynching bill passed by House, makes its way to Senate

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“The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act,” designating lynching as a federal hate crime, was passed by the House on Monday and is now on its way to the Senate to possibly be signed into law.

The historic bill was approved on the last day of Black History Month and 65 years after Till, a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago, was murdered in a brutal lynching in Mississippi in 1955.

Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush, who authored the House bill, said its passage marked “a day of enormous consequence for our nation.”

“I was eight years old when my mother put the photograph of Emmett Till’s brutalized