by Mary Rupert
The Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Reauthorization Act is poised to pass the U.S. House and Senate next week, according to Kansas City, Kan., human rights activist Alvin Sykes.
Sykes said the bill is scheduled to come to a vote in the House next week, and after that, it is expected to go to the Senate, possibly on Friday.
The bill allows federal investigators to look into any civil rights-era murder occurring before 1979, Sykes said. It applies to murders that were racially motivated. The bill encourages a partnership between federal and state investigators in unsolved civil rights cases, because of a federal five-year statute of limitations. The state has no statute of limitations on murder cases.
The bill is the extension of a civil rights bill that became law in 2007 and is set to expire in September of 2017.
An earlier version of the bill went through the Senate on July 14 by unanimous consent and then moved to the House, he said. There were some compromises recently made to the bill, he added.
Sykes is optimistic about the bill’s passage. Sykes said the key to the bill being successful was the recent re-election of Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., a sponsor, and other cosponsors. Another key sponsor was Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. Other lawmakers who were co-sponsors were Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., and Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo.
Sykes led an effort to get the reauthorization of the Till act passed this year. Emmett Till was a teenager in Chicago in 1955, when he traveled to Mississippi, and was brutally murdered. Two men were found not guilty in a trial in 1955, because the body could not be positively identified, but later admitted to the killing in a national magazine. In the 2000s, the case was reopened and the body was positively identified.
“I feel very good, it’s been a long time coming,” Sykes said about the bill being considered on Monday. “We did not get everything we wanted, but it was enough to move forward to solve civil rights murders.
“It is one more time that the poison that came out of Till’s death continues to be transferred to the medicine of justice for countless victims in the future,” Sykes said.