After more than a century of failed attempts, racist lynchings in the United States are now classified as hate crimes.

US President Joe Biden signed a corresponding federal law on Tuesday, which both chambers of Congress had previously passed.

It provides for a sentence of up to 30 years for cases of lynching in which a victim is seriously injured or killed.

This ends a story of impunity for thousands of lynchings, which researchers say often went unpunished between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and 1950.

More than 200 attempts failed

Congress has struggled many times over the past few decades to establish lynching as a separate criminal offense.

The Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, said when the bill was passed in the Chamber in early March that more than 200 attempts in Congress over the decades to introduce a corresponding law had failed.

The move is long overdue to address the "darkest elements" of American history.

The new law makes a difference between lynching and murder.

The intended effect of the act is decisive.

The murder is said to be directed not only against the victim, but also against a specific group of people who are to be targeted because of their "race", religion or sexual orientation.

A message should be sent to a whole community.

Messages like "You're not safe here" or "You could be next," as Justin Hansford from Howard University told the US news portal Vox.

As an example, he cites the case of the man who, in 2017,

Charlottesville hit and killed a young woman with his car during a demonstration against racism.

The new law complements a law passed by Barack Obama in 2009 that introduced the category of "hate crimes."

According to civil rights activists, at least 4,000 lynchings were documented in the southern states of the United States between 1877 and 1950.

Victims were mostly black Americans - men, women and children - who were hanged, burned alive, shot or beaten to death by white mobs.

The number of unreported lynchings is even higher.

A particularly well-known case is that of 14-year-old Emmett Till, after whom the law, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, is now named.

The Chicago teenager was murdered in 1955 while visiting relatives in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at and touching a white woman.

The two white perpetrators were acquitted by an all-white jury, but later confessed to the crime in an interview.

Till's murder is one of the most notorious crimes of the segregation era and fueled the black civil rights movement in the southern states.

Till's mother had insisted that her dead son be laid out in an open coffin so that the brutality of the murder would become public.

Harris calls lynching an "eyesore" on history

According to experts, the new law is primarily symbolic in order to counteract the atrocities of the past.

According to this, however, cases in the present could also fall under the definition of lynching and be prosecuted accordingly.

Biden specifically emphasized that the law is not only about the past, but also about the present.

Even today, the United States struggles with racial hatred.

"Hate never goes away, it just hides," he lamented.

Vice President Kamala Harris called lynching an "eyesore" on United States history.

At the same time, she also emphasized that it was “not a relic of the past”.

Racist terror still occurs today.