On Wednesday, February 26, the most recent iteration of an anti-lynching bill passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act (HR 35), if passed in the Senate and signed into law, would declare lynching to be a federal hate crime. There is hope that this anti-lynching bill will be the one that finally codifies this horror, as a similar bill in the Senate was approved unanimously last year, and there are signs this House-approved version will pass the Senate quickly.

This comes 120 years after the first attempt to federally criminalize the act, in 1900, when the only black congressmember at the time, North Carolina’s George Henry White, introduced an anti-lynching bill. Since then, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills have come and gone.

So yesterday’s 410 votes in support of this bill, from both sides of the aisle, are a piece of hope to cling to during this time of increased hate crimes, including the continued use of lynching, or the threat of lynching, to terrorize Black Americans. Ferguson activist Melissa McKinnies believed her son, 24-year-old Danye Jones, was lynched in 2018, and just last month 17-year-old Jace Colucci saw a drawing of himself with a noose around his neck in a school locker room.

But even this precarious bit of progress wasn’t unanimously approved. During yesterday’s move toward a potentially historic law, 16 members didn’t vote, and four voted against the bill: Independent Justin Amash of Michigan, and Republicans Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Ted Yoho of Florida, and Louie Gohmert of Texas. Their objections appear to be based on the idea that the bill would represent a form of overreach for the federal government.

Amash tweeted a pretty lengthy thread detailing his reasoning, including the “federalization of criminal law.” Yoho told CNN it’s an “overreach of the federal government.” According to the Houston Chronicle, Gohmert also had trouble with the “federal nexus of lynching” and the maximum sentence of the bill. Massie told Kentucky's Courier-Journal, "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,” and he agreed with Yoho’s claim that it should be left up to state governments.

Keep in mind that there are already federal hate crime laws, such as the Shepard-Byrd Act, which makes it a federal crime to “willfully cause bodily injury, or attempt to do so using a dangerous weapon,” because of the victim’s actual or perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, disability, color, or race. This law specifically says that causing bodily injury because of race is a federal hate crime, and lynching is widely associated with torture inflicted on Black Americans by white Americans, including domestic terrorists like the Ku Klux Klan.

As stated in this most recent anti-lynching bill, most documented lynchings were “mass, moblike lynchings,” which “were barbaric, by nature characterized by members of the mob, mostly White southerners, shooting, burning, and mutilating the victim’s body, alive.” The bill also noted that between 1892 and 1968, 4,742 lynchings were reported, meaning those are just the ones we know about, and the majority of those victims were Black. Among them was 14-year-old Emmett Till, whose torture and lynching, in 1955, changed the trajectory of our country as a spark that catalyzed the Civil Rights movement.