*Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Charles Booker released a new campaign video Wednesday in which he appears wearing a noose.
The stunt is an attempt to call out Senator Rand Paul’s opposition to a federal anti-lynching bill, as reported by TMZ. The video opens with a shot of a noose hanging from a tree.
“The pain of our past persists to this day,” Booker is heard saying at the beginning of the clip. “In Kentucky, like many states throughout the South, lynching was a tool for terror. It was used to kill hopes for freedom.”
“It was used to kill my ancestors,” Booker says as he appears on camera wearing a noose around his neck. “Now, in an historic victory for our commonwealth, I have become the first Black Kentuckian to receive the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate.”
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Let’s make freedom ring. Real freedom, from the hood to the holler.
We can start by taking our seat back from Rand Paul.
I’m running. pic.twitter.com/Za7JJ1wz0D
— Charles Booker (@Booker4KY) July 1, 2021
“My opponent?” Booker says about Paul. “The very person who compared expanded health care to slavery. The person who said he would have opposed The Civil Rights Act. The person who single-handedly blocked an anti-lynching act from being federal law.”
In 2020, Paul was the lone holdout on passing a bill that would make lynching a federal crime. At the time he said he called for more discussion to “make the language the best that we can get it,” noting his concern that the language might “unintentionally mete out 10-year sentences for minor altercations.”
Earlier this year, Paul supported a new version of the legislation, which passed the Senate. President Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act in March.
“It wasn’t a popular stand to slow this bill down, but I wanted to do it because, you know, I thought it was the right thing to do,” Paul told The Louisville Courier-Journal in an interview in February. “And in the end, I think the compromise language will hopefully keep us from incarcerating somebody for some kind of crime that’s not lynching.”
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