Justice for Victims of Lynching Act of 2018

Floor Speech

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Mr. BOOKER. Thank you, Madam President.

I want to thank Senator Harris for her incredible partnership and leadership on this bill, and I want to thank Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina for his leadership and for the consistent examples of character and integrity they both have shown as my partners on this legislation in this body.

As my colleague has said, it has been a very long time coming. 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 biased, motivated act of terror.

Today, Senator Harris and I have requested that after a century-- after 100 years and over 200 bills introduced in this body--we finally make lynching a Federal crime in the United States of America.

Thanks to the work of incredible people around this country--truth tellers such as Brian Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative-- today, we have a more comprehensive understanding of just how widespread and purposefully lynching was used as a tool of racial terror and oppression in our history.

We know that the Equal Justice Initiative was able to document thousands of cases--over 4,000 documented cases of racially motivated lynchings between 1877 and 1950. During that time, lynchings were used to terrorize communities. They weren't only vicious acts of murder against individuals, but in many cases bodies were hung trying to drive fear into communities to make them submit to second-class citizenship and inconsistent justice.

The use of lynching as a larger part of terrorism is disturbing. It is a dark chapter of our past and part of our history. Its legacy doesn't just live in our history books. Despite activists and organizations that have dedicated themselves to studying and addressing the racial terror in our history, we have failed to correct for many of those past sins.

We know that the passage of this bill will not undo the damage, the terror, and the violence that have been done and the lives that were brutally taken in our past. We do know that the passage of this bill, even though it cannot reverse the irrevocable harm caused by lynching used as terrorist oppression, is a recognition of that dark past. We know that when wrongs are ignored they fester underneath the skin of the body politic, and we know that justice delayed is justice denied. Today, this is a moment of potential justice in this body, a reckoning to the victims of lynching that for too long have been denied.

I want to go back to a point in history in this body. The very first bill introduced by Congress to address the terror of lynching was by a man on the other side of the Capitol, Congressman George Henry White, in 1900. The year after it was introduced, in 1901, was the last year he would serve in Congress. That is because Congressman White was the very last Black Congressman of the group who had been elected to Congress during Reconstruction.

Congressman White's departure in 1901 would be the last time an African-American Black southerner would serve in Congress for over 70 years. Congressman White must have had an understanding of what was to come with the long dearth of time and the lack of diversity. He knew the terror of Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement that would stop the election of African-Americans.

In his last speech in this body on January 29, 1901, 1 year after he introduced the bill to criminalize lynching, he delivered a farewell address he called ``The Negro's Temporary Farewell to the American Congress.''

In that address to Congress over one century ago, he made the same request that Senator Harris and I are making right now--for the United States to officially criminalize lynching.

Congressman White said:

Mr. Chairman, permit me to digress for a few moments for the purpose of calling the attention of the House to a bill which I regard as important, introduced by me in the early part of the first session of this Congress.

[It was intended] to give the United States control and entire jurisdiction over all cases of lynching and death by mob violence.

During the last session of this Congress I took occasion to address myself in detail to this particular measure, but with all my efforts, the bill still sweetly sleeps in the room of the committee to which it was referred. The necessity of legislation along this line is daily being demonstrated. The arena of the lyncher no longer is confined to Southern climes, but is stretching its hydra head over all parts of the Union.

Referring to the terror of lynching, Congressman White knew that ``the evil peculiar to America, yes, to the United States, must be met, somehow, some day . . . ''

Well, now in this moment in America, we have a chance to make some day today. We have the opportunity to recognize the wrongs of our history, to honor the memories of those brutally killed, and to leave a legacy that future generations can look back on, knowing that after 200 attempts over the course of 100 years of trying, on this day in American history this body will do the right thing.

So I would recognize my colleague from California for the historic calling up of this piece of legislation.

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Mr. BOOKER. Madam President, my friend, the Senator from Oregon, just came over. This is a very meaningful moment for this body.

There was a speech by a man that I revere. His picture hangs in my office. His name is Martin Luther King. For many people who endured the pain and agony of our past, with lynchings that went on up to the 1970s in this country, and for those people who yearned for justice they would never experience, for those people who know the pain, agony, and hurt in their family's history and the trauma that is still felt by many people today, who remember lynching in this country that was so pervasive--Dr. King once spoke to those people who were hurting and seeking justice, and he asked at the end of his speech:

How long? Not long, because ``the truth crushed to the earth will rise again.''

He asked:

How long? Not long, because ``no lie can live forever.''

He asked:

How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

This has been a long arc, a painful history and shameful history in this body--that at the height of lynchings across this country affecting thousands of people, this body did not act to make it a Federal crime. At least now, the U.S.

I just want to give gratitude to this body for what we have just done. Thank you.

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