The US Senate has unanimously passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a bill to make lynching a federal hate crime. Such efforts had failed for more than a century.

Bobby Rush, the Illinois Democrat who introduced the measure in the House, said: “Despite more than 200 attempts to outlaw this heinous form of racial terror at the federal level, it has never before been done. Today, we corrected that historic injustice. Next stop: [Joe Biden’s] desk.”

The New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker, Senate co-sponsor with Tim Scott of South Carolina, a Republican, said: “The time is past due to reckon with this dark chapter in our history and I’m proud of the bipartisan support to pass this important piece of legislation.”

Subject to Biden’s signature, the bill will make lynching a hate crime punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

According to the Equal Justice Initiative, about 4,400 African Americans were lynched in the US between the end of Reconstruction, in the 1870s, and the years of the second world war. Some killings were watched by crowds. postcards and souvenirs were sometimes sold.

The bill heading for Biden’s desk is named for Emmett Till, who was 14 when he was tortured and murdered in Mississippi in August 1955. Two white men were tried but acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury, then confessed. The killing helped spark the civil rights movement.

The House passed Rush’s anti-lynching measure 422-3. Three Republicans voted no: Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Chip Roy of Texas and Andrew Clyde of Georgia.

In 2020, in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis and amid national protests for racial justice, the chamber passed an earlier version of the bill with a similar bipartisan vote.

Then, the measure was blocked in the Senate. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican, said he did so because “the bill as written would allow altercations resulting in a cut, abrasion, bruise or any other injury no matter how temporary to be subject to a 10-year penalty”.

Paul also called lynchings a “horror” and said he supported the bill but for its too-broad language.

Kamala Harris, then a senator from California, now vice-president, called Paul’s stance “insulting”.

Late last year, in another high-profile case, three white men were convicted in the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, a young Black man who went jogging in a Georgia neighbourhood.

In an interview published on Tuesday, Christine Turner, director of the Oscar-nominated short Lynching Postcards: Token of a Great Day, referred to the Arbery murder when she told the Guardian: “There are many what people refer to as modern-day lynchings that may cause some people to take our history of lynching more seriously.”

On Monday, in a further statement, Rush said lynching was “a longstanding and uniquely American weapon of racial terror that has for decades been used to maintain the white hierarchy.

“Perpetrators of lynching got away with murder time and time again – in most cases, they were never even brought to trial … Today, we correct this historic and abhorrent injustice.”

He also cited a great civil rights leader: “I am reminded of Dr King’s famous words: ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’”