Review of Emmett Till case revives anti-lynching legislation

victims endured after Reconstruction ended was excruciating. With practically no protection from state or federal governments, despite the 14th Amendment being law, the racist torment of lynch mobs plagued the Jim Crow South. In 1939, famed jazz vocalist Billie Holiday articulated this horror in “Strange Fruit,” singing, “Pastoral scene of the gallant south, the bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh, then the sudden smell of burning flesh.”

With documentation of more than 4700 lynchings of African Americans in this country, the majority of the victims black males, Booker is right that we have not righted “historical wrongs.” The time for federal legislation that criminalizes lynching is long overdue.

I do not think it is happenstance that the Victims of Lynching Act is coinciding with the Justice Department’s decision to review Till’s case. Having grown up in Georgia learning about the national impact of Till’s murder, I believe this intersection is, as the elders often say, divine intervention.

My mother, who was a junior in high school when Till was killed, can still recall the distress in her community during this time after hearing the fateful news from Money, Miss. Upon learning the gruesome details of how Till was tortured to death for allegedly flirting with a white woman, black parents grieved for him as if he were their own son. I cringe every time I come across the Jet Magazine photo of Till’s open-casket funeral, the one with his mother Mamie crying over his disfigured body that had been thrown into the Tallahatchie River.

What has made Till’s death a longstanding stain on our history for 63 years is that an all-white jury acquitted the two men — Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam — who slaughtered him. Bryant and Milam are dead, but the FBI may be able to bring some closure to Till’s family by again interviewing Carolyn Bryant Donham — Bryant’s former wife and the woman who accused Till of whistling at her — as they did in 2004. Perhaps her conscience would weigh heavily to continue the revelations she has shared in "The Blood of Emmett Till," a 2017 book by Duke University professor Timothy B. Tyson, in which she said she lied about Till's actions.

It is always difficult to revisit the nadir of the lynching era. Harris, Booker and Scott’s legislation will not turn the hands of time to administer the justice that should have been meted out in court over a century ago. We cannot retry Bryant and Milam. But if the Senate can finally pass a bill that expressively condemns the racial hatred and violence lynching victims suffered, it will bring much-needed healing to our nation’s soul.