Charles Booker.Photo: Timothy D Easley/AP/Shutterstock
“The pain of our past persists to this day,” he says. “In Kentucky, like many states throughout the south, lynching was a tool of terror.”
After Booker goes on to describe the history of lynching in America, the footage then shifts to show the candidate with the noose around his own neck.
“It was used to kill my ancestors,” Booker says, going on to note that he made history when he secured the Democratic nomination for Senate —the first Black person to do soin the state of Kentucky.
As Booker notes, his opponent in the Senate race — incumbent Rand Paul, a Republican — heldup a popular piece of bi-partisan anti-lynching legislationin the Senate last year. At the time, Paul said he wanted the bill to be “stronger,” and argued that it conflated “someone who has an altercation, where they had minor bruises, with lynching.”
Sen. Rand Paul.Greg Nash-Pool/Getty Images
“The choice couldn’t be clearer,” Booker says in the ad. “Do we move forward together? Or do we let politicians like Rand Paul forever hold us back and drive us apart?”
In a tweet, Booker noted that Paul’s vote against the anti-lynching legislation in 2020 coincided with the funeral ofGeorge Floyd.
“Let us not forget that on the day of George Floyd’s funeral, a day of mourning, a day where the nation marched for equality, Rand Paul blocked a bill that would have made lynching a federal hate crime,” Booker tweeted. “We won’t forget this. Not now, and not in November.
In March, Paul announced that hesupported an updated version of the measureand has signed on as a co-sponsor of the new version of the bill.
TheEmmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022would designate lynching as a federal hate crime and is so-named for murdered African-American teenagerEmmett Till, a 14-year-old whose body was found mutilated in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, in 1955.
source: people.com
