Rufus Jones: Anti-lynching legislation is a step toward justice more than a century in the making

Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., speaks in February 2020 about the "Emmett Till Antilynching Act," which Congress finally passed this week. Emmett Till, pictured at right, was a 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after being accused of offending a white woman in her family's grocery store.

By Rufus Jones:

A little more than 100 years ago, James Weldon Johnson joined the effort to pass the Dyer Anti Lynching Bill (H.R. 11279). Originally introduced by William Monroe Trotter and Hubert Harrison and ultimately supported by the NAACP, the legislation aimed to make the lynching of private citizens a federal crime.