US Congress passes bill to make lynching a hate crime

His mutilated body was found three days later in a local river.

Till’s mother famously insisted that her son’s remains be displayed in an open casket to show the world what had been done to her boy.

Till was murdered several days after a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, alleged that he had propositioned her in a store and touched her on the arm, hand and waist.

Two white Mississippi men, Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, and J.W. Milam, his half-brother, were arrested for Till’s murder but acquitted by an all-white jury.

The pair later admitted in a magazine interview that they had killed the boy.

Roy Bryant died in 1994 and Milam died in 1981.

The Justice Department re-opened its probe into Till’s murder in 2018 after Carolyn Bryant, now known as Carolyn Donham, had recanted portions of her testimony in interviews with an author of a book on the case.

But the Justice Department said Donham “denied to the FBI that she ever recanted her testimony and provided no information beyond what was uncovered during the previous federal investigation.”

In December, the department ended its investigation into the murder.

“The government’s re-investigation found no new evidence suggesting that either the woman or any other living person was involved in Till’s abduction and murder,” it said.

Democratic Senator Cory Booker, who introduced legislation to make lynching a federal crime in 2018, said Monday that lynching was “a shameful instrument of terror used to intimidate and oppress Black Americans.”

“This legislation is a necessary step America must take to heal from the racialized violence that has permeated its history,” his statement read.