EXPLAINER: What’s behind the new federal anti-lynching law?

By COREY WILLIAMS
Associated Press

The history of racial violence in the U.S. is the backdrop as President Joe Biden signs the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act into law. The act is the result of the first bill to specify lynching as a federal hate crime. It allows for the prosecution of actions as lynchings if they are done during a hate crime in which the victim is injured or slain. It also comes with 30 years in prison and fines for anyone conspiring to commit an act of lynching that causes death or injury. The law is named after Emmett Till, a Black 14-year-old who was kidnapped, beaten and shot in the head in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Mississippi.