They are only three to have voted against: Thomas Massie, elected of Kentucky, Andrew Clyde, representative of Georgia, and Chip Roy, of Texas.
The opposition of this trio of Republicans had not prevented the House of Representatives of the United States from adopting at the end of February, by an overwhelming majority, a law making illegal lynching at the federal level.
The Senate then validated the text unanimously and President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act on Tuesday March 29, ending more than 100 years of unsuccessful attempts to ban this practice at the federal level. racist and barbaric that has deeply marked the history of the United States.
Around 6,500 victims of lynching
“The lynching represented an act of pure terror in order to impose the lie that not everyone had the right to be in the United States, that individuals were not all born equal,” said Joe Biden, shortly after. signing the law.
The Emmett Till Antilynching Act was named in memory of an African-American teenager, Emmett Till, who was lynched in 1955 in the state of Mississippi after being accused of having "whistled" a "white" woman in the street.
His brutal murder by two racist individuals in the south of the country was one of the founding acts of the civil rights movement in the United States, recalls the New York Times.
The new law provides for a 30-year prison sentence for anyone who commits a lynching, now defined as organizing a hate crime that results in the death or serious injury of the victim.
This new legislation has an "essentially symbolic scope, of historical interpretation", underlines Paul Schor, specialist in the social history of the United States at the Center for North American Studies of the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS ), contacted by France 24.
Lynching as it was practiced after the American Civil War (1865) and until the end of the 1950s, no longer exists.
It was an act of political terror which, in order to bolster supremacist politics in the Southern states, was defined "by civil rights organizations as the extrajudicial execution by multiple individuals of a person accused of a crime" , recalls Paul Schor.
About 6,500 people, almost exclusively African Americans, were victims during this period.
These racist murders tolerated – even encouraged – by the local authorities could be decided for acts as trivial as knocking on the door of a "white" woman or not speaking to an Alabama police officer in the calling "Mr", recalls the Washington Post.
Joe Biden's signing of the Emmett Till Antilynching Act finally "affirms that in this country lynching black people is not and has never been acceptable", rejoices the Washington Post in an editorial.
The American president has also endeavored to accentuate this historical dimension of the signature by “surrounding himself with people who are either descendants of victims of lynching or representatives of the civil rights movements”, notes Paul Schor.
Joe Biden had notably invited to his side the great-granddaughter of journalist and activist Ida B. Wells who had been, at the end of the 19th century, the first to launch a campaign to ban lynching.
Some 200 failed attempts to ban lynching
But it is a ban that comes "scandalously much too late. Almost a century too late", regrets the Washington Post in its editorial.
Congress repeated it more than 200 times before succeeding in passing a federal law against this practice.
Legislative efforts began in 1900 when George Henry White, the only African-American representative in Congress at the time, attempted to have the practice banned federally.
But he had failed in the face of obstruction by elected officials from the southern states.
A pattern that has repeated itself again and again over the years, despite the support of seven American presidents for the various bills presented to Congress.
In 2005, the Senate even decided to officially apologize for never having succeeded in banning lynching.
Even the text that Joe Biden signed was almost buried.
It took three years for it to hit the table in the Oval Office.
The Republican Senator from Kentucky Rand Paul had also defeated a first version of this law, because lynching was defined therein "too broadly" for his taste.
He wanted, and got, that only acts resulting in death or serious injury be covered by the law…
Modern lynchings?
Historically, opposition to these anti-lynching efforts has come less from the Republican bench than from that of Southern state Democrats.
They are the ones who, after the Civil War of 1860, were among the most segregationist, recalls the historian Louis P. Masur, in an opinion piece published in the Washington Post.
They accused Republicans in the northern states of wanting to ban lynching just to win the votes of African Americans…
These representatives of the Southern states have also long maintained that there was no reason to adopt such a law because texts prohibiting lynching existed at the local level.
Which is true, "except that no one respected him", underlines Louis P. Masur.
This is why "for decades civil rights activists have turned to the United States government to adopt a text at the federal level", specifies Paul Schor.
If the adoption of the new law remains above all a way for the Democratic president to repair a historic legislative breach, the text could prove useful again.
He was introduced to the Senate in 2020 after the murders that year of George Floyd by a police officer and Ahmaud Arbery, chased and shot dead by three individuals while jogging.
Various racist facts which had, recalls the BBC, raised the specter of a modern form of lynching.
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