How a bill doesn’t become a law

Ida B. Wells, born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862, was forced in 1892 to flee her Memphis newspaper, the Free Speech, after racist thugs destroyed its offices. It was punishment for her exposing lynchings — the brutal public killings typically of Black men by white mobs. Many were hanged and tortured; others were mutilated and decapitated. This was terrorism designed to intimidate an entire community.

Wells arrived in Brooklyn and continued her crusade in the New York Age, writing “The Truth About Lynching.” It exploded the poisonous myth perpetuated by whites that lynchings were punishment for rapes. She wrote of “the flaying alive of a man in Kentucky, the burning of one in Arkansas, the hanging of a 15-year-old girl in Louisiana.”

In 1900, Rep. George Henry White, a Black Republican from North Carolina, introduced the first federal anti-lynching bill. It died in committee.

In 1922, the bill came around again, supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which had mounted a powerful campaign detailing the lynching of 3,436 people over the previous three decades. President Warren Harding backed the bill, and it passed the House with a twothirds majority — before it went on to die in the Senate that year, and the next, and the next due to filibusters by Southern Democrats.

For generations thereafter, the lynchings continued, totaling 4,743 by one count and 6,400 by another. Mississippi suffered at least 581; Georgia, 531; Texas, 493. But the bill could never get through the Senate.

In 2019, Sen. Tim Scott, a Black South Carolina Republican, joined Sen. Cory Booker, a Black New Jersey Democrat and Rep. Bobby Rush, a Black Democrat from Chicago, to introduce the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, making lynching a federal hate crime. In 2022, racist vigilante justice continues, as seen in the federal hate crime conviction of three men who targeted and murdered Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, but lynchings as we knew them are blessedly rare. Monday, the bill passed the Senate unanimously. Better 122 years late than never.