the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Apr 11, 2022
On March 7, the U.S. Congress finally made lynching a federal hate crime, calling the bill “the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act.” They patted themselves on the back for a job well done. But Congress had more than 200 other opportunities to make lynching a crime before this, and never did.
Tuskegee University has documented 4,742 OTHER incidents of lynchings in the United States besides the horrific torture and murder of Emmett Till in 1955.
South or North or Midwest, white mobs have decided to kill other human beings, almost always black people, without trial and with pitiless hatred for over 150 years. That is the U.S. history that some in Congress say is too terrible to teach to children at school.
It was Martin Luther King Jr. who pointed out that "justice delayed is justice denied,” although members of Congress don’t usually admit their long hypocritical record. But it is song-writer Gil Scott-Heron who bitterly made the point: “I have become a special amendment for what included me all along: ‘All men are created equal.’ “