• This story is from 2018. For updates on anti-lynching legislation, go here.

The Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a bill that would, for the first time, explicitly make lynching a federal crime.

“For over a century, members of Congress have attempted to pass some version of a bill that would recognize lynching for what it is: a bias-motivated act of terror,” Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat who introduced the bill, said in a statement. “Today, we have righted that wrong and taken corrective action that recognizes this stain on our country’s history.”

More than 4,700 people, the vast majority of them black, were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, according to the N.A.A.C.P. Perpetrators were rarely prosecuted. Congress has tried and failed some 200 times to pass similar anti-lynching legislation since 1882, according to the bill.

The bill, titled the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018, was introduced in June by the Senate’s three black members: Kamala Harris, a California Democrat; Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican; and Mr. Booker. A spokeswoman for Ms. Harris said her office was trying to get the House to schedule a vote on the bill before Congress adjourns this week.