The Emmett Till Bill: America’s reluctance toward introspection
30th March 2020 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
Late on the evening of Oct. 11, 1933, between 50 and 100 angry whites forced 16-year-old Black teen Freddie (sometimes spelled Freddy) Moore out of a jail cell in Napoleonville, La., in Assumption Parish, wrapped a noose around his neck and dragged him to the nearby sugar cane field where the body of a teenage white girl, Annie (or Anna) Mae LaRose, had reportedly been found murdered three days before, stabbed to death in the throat.
The swelling mob – which, according to contemporaneous news reports, was led by a local deputy sheriff and was bolstered by dozens of white New Orleanians – beat Moore and burned him with branding irons, forcing the youth to falsely confess to raping and murdering the white girl.
The surging horde then hauled Moore to Labadieville, La. – effectively a 10-mile death march – where the whites stripped Moore to his waist and threw the battered youth from the Labadieville Bridge that traversed Bayou LaFourche, killing him. Several gunshots were fired into Moore’s body, onto which, according to some reports, was fastened a note stating, “This n***** was lynched on account of raping a white woman.” Other accounts report that the pinned note stated, “N*****s, let this be an example. Do not touch for 24 hours.”
Moore’s body was left dangling from the bridge overnight, and in the morning, small crowds of Blacks and whites gathered to witness the culmination of virulent, racist rage aimed at intimidating and frightening thousands of local Black residents. The implied message of Moore’s death – figuratively scrawled in his blood – was a reinforcement of white supremacy and social order that would be oppressively enforced at all costs, by violence and the shattering of all legal procedures and mechanisms.
In the ensuing weeks, it was revealed that Annie Mae LaRose’s step-father had, in fact, confessed to the crime.
Such events – vague allegations, mob violence, righteous public horror, the trampling of the rule of law – occurred thousands upon thousands of times in the United States following the end of the Civil War. Lynchings of Black men and women throughout the South and around the country employed fear as a form of control and profit.
While other vulnerable populations – such as Italian Americans, Jews, Native Americans and Asian Americans – were targets of mob terrorism throughout the decades in America, it was African Americans in the South who bore the brunt of the crazed brutality.
According to the Tuskegee Institute, a total of more than 4,700 lynchings took place in America between 1882 and 1968, with nearly three-quarters occurring in the South. However, according to the Equal Justice Institute, 4,084 racial lynchings took place in the South between 1877 and 1950 (roughly the end of Reconstruction and the start of the modern Civil Rights Movement). Of the ones tallied by the EJI, 548 happened in Louisiana.
Yet despite all such examples of mob violence, no federal lynching bill was ever passed by both houses of Congress. That included the repeated defeat of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which was filed by Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican Congressman from Missouri, in 1918. The House of Representatives adopted the Dyer Bill in 1922, but it was held up by Southern Democrats in the Senate who were able to kill it shortly after. The Democratic senators were often propped up by a racially rigged electorate and couched in familiar cries of “states rights” and legislative procedural loopholes, tactics of which civil rights advocates were painfully aware.
But last month, more than a century after the Dyer Bill died, the House of Representatives passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, named after a teen in Mississippi whose torture, murder and mutilation in 1955 was one of the key moments in the start of the Civil Rights Movement.
The House’s vote followed the U.S. Senate’s unanimous adoption last year of its own anti-lynching measure, the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, finally clearing the path for nationwide hate-crime legislation around lynching.
The legislative and spiritual descendant of the Dyer Bill and other subsequent anti-lynching efforts – RollCall.com said Congress has had more than 200 cracks at such a measure, including the Costigan-Warner Bill of 1934 (which was also stymied by Senate Democrats from the Jim Crow South) – the Emmett Till Antilynching Bill makes lynching a federal hate crime. A similar bill was passed in 2019 by the Senate – the first time that body had ever approved a federal lynching bill – with broad bipartisan support, and the House adopted its own version on Feb. 26, with only three Republican Congressmen and one independent voting against it.
All that’s left to make the Emmett Till Bill federal law is for the Senate to officially sync its own Justice for Victims of Lynching Act with the House’s Emmett Till Act and for President Trump to sign it. Although that might take longer than hoped given the swirling chaos of COVID-19, signs are pointing to both those final steps eventually happening.
U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, told The Louisiana Weekly that adopting a federal lynching law was simply a moral imperative.
“Lynching is one part of the American population taking the power of the state into their own hands for the purpose of striking fear in a part of the American population,” Cassidy said. “But we are all Americans.
“This bill passing Congress recognizes the horror of lynching,” Cassidy added, “and that when that horror is used as a weapon of terror, it should be condemned more than other terrible crimes should be condemned.”
Other Louisiana officials in Washington, D.C., including Congressmen Cedric Richmond and Steve Scalise, declined to make a comment to The Louisiana Weekly about the passage of the Emmett Till Bill.
Recognition of the existence and vicious purpose of lynching, as Cassidy said, is crucial to the type of reconciliation found in the codification of definitions, scope, severity and implementation of measures of justice for the crime.
Tulane associate professor of English and of African & African Diaspora Studies Nghana T. Lewis, told The Louisiana Weekly recently that historical myopia and reluctance to be self-reflective as a nation were some of the reasons it took an anti-lynching bill more than a century to pass both houses of Congress – and why bigotry and institutional racism persist to this day.
“The hold-up [of lynching bills] results from the challenges America has historically faced when confronting the darker realities of our existence as a nation: we simply have not been honest enough and bold enough in dealing with the realities of lynchings that occurred in large numbers throughout the first half of the 20th century,” she said, “and we continue to cower in the face of other forms of domestic terrorism that operate to this day to disenfranchise and dehumanize oppressed people in America.”
In particular, Louisiana must do some serious reckoning of its own when it comes to lynching and its own blood-stained history. Lewis said that although the Pelican State’s past includes vital, shining examples of the Civil Rights effort – the 1811 slave rebellion in the River Parishes, the lawsuit filed by Homer Plessy in New Orleans in the 1890s, and the nation’s first bus boycott in Baton Rouge – the state’s history also includes such violent tragedies as the 1873 massacre in Colfax, La., of dozens of Black men by whites attempting to reinstitute white authority and control in the waning days of Reconstruction.
Lewis said she recently traveled to Colfax to attend a court hearing for a client, and by just looking at many of the current residents of the town, she could see reflections of that bloody history.
“It is 2020, and the looks on the faces of many of the Black (and white) residents that I encountered at the courthouse and areas surrounding this hub bear a heaviness that is really indescribable,” she said. “The town feels like it’s holding its breath, can’t exhale, and is dying a slow death by suffocation. In a strange way, it looks like what I imagine a lynching must feel like. And I think a lot of that look has to do with our state’s sordid past and the literal bloodshed that occurred in so many parts of Louisiana to prevent Black progress and further white supremacy.”
Now, nationwide, in 2020, with a couple final official steps remaining before the Emmett Till Antilynching Bill becomes the law of the land, it also remains how the act could and would be applied on a federal level across the country.
Up for discussion is whether the Till bill is simply a showy political move that symbolically atones for more than a century of inaction in the face of terror, or if the measure would have actual teeth, said Tulane’s Lewis.
“The jury is still out on whether the passage of the bill is symbolic or will have enforceable effect,” she said. “Because it’s federal, you also have to have an administration that takes its duty to uphold and enforce the law seriously. We will see what the jury decides on that one [on] Nov. 3, 2020 [Election Day].”
The arguments of the four Congressmen – Louie Gohmert, R-Texas; Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky; Ted Yoho, R-Florida; and Justin Amash, I-Michigan – who voted against the Emmett Till bill last month were laced with echoes of the “states rights” reasoning that had doomed similar legislation over the previous century, including that each state already has its own enforceable laws against lynching, which would make a federal law redundant.
“This bill today is an overreach of the federal government and encroaches on the principles of federalism,” Newsweek quoted Yoho in saying. “Hate crimes fall under the jurisdiction of states, which has led to 46 states producing various hate crime statutes. In my home state of Florida, these crimes are already under state government jurisdiction and are punishable up to death.”
The Newsweek article also featured a statement from Massie, who expressed concern that the new bill would endanger individual citizens’ rights.
“The Constitution specifies only a handful of federal crimes and leaves the rest to individual states to prosecute,” Massie said. “In addition, this bill expands current federal ‘hate crime’ laws. A crime is a crime, and all victims deserve equal justice. Adding enhanced penalties for ‘hate’ tends to endanger other liberties, such as freedom of speech.”
Referring to such lingering arguments and other possible complications facing the Emmett Till bill, Lewis said that regardless of the final form and thrust a federal antilynching act might take, we as a country are still left with the long, tragic legacies of fear, injustice and iniquity that created the circumstances, including mob terrorism, in the Jim Crow South.
As an example of such lingering shadows of oppression, she pointed to threats to the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, which Congress has, despite concurrent, positive discussion of a lynching bill, failed to update and strengthen, and which the U.S. Supreme Court gutted in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder.
She also alluded to the many states that have used such methods as voter ID laws to strip much of the electorate of its vote, as well as the vast disparities per-pupil spending in public schools between wealthier communities and poorer ones.
Lewis said such failures of government and of conscience can be traced back to the effects of lynching, a connection that still needs to be made clear to many Americans.
“If a majority of Americans understood and acknowledged the horrors of lynching,” she said, “we would be at a much more advanced state in terms of addressing and remedying its vestiges and other vestiges of Jim Crow.
“I am not sure I have the answer to how we go about educating people who do not understand the horrors and scale of lynching in America,” she added, “because we have not done the best job educating Americans on a number of basic things about our history that Americans should know.”
This article originally published in the March 30, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
