President Biden on Tuesday signed a bill making lynching a federal hate crime, finally cementing a legislative triumph that’s eluded generations of lawmakers, civil rights groups and seven presidents — and one, he lamented, that’s still needed in a country where racial violence persists.

“Racial hate isn’t an old problem,” Biden said after signing the bill in the Rose Garden. “It’s a persistent problem.”

The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act is named in honor of a 14-year-old Black boy who was kidnapped and tortured to death in Mississippi in 1955. The law will designate conspiracies to commit crimes in which hate is the motivating factor and which result in death or serious bodily injury as federal hate crimes punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

Its passage comes nearly two years after the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed Black motorist, by a Minnesota police officer who knelt on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. Captured on cellphone video, the killing evoked memories of Till’s murder and countless more recent instances of police brutality against Black Americans. It quickly prompted calls for police reform. When lawmakers failed to reach a compromise on legislation to overhaul law enforcement training and practices, the anti-lynching legislation became a fallback of sorts.

Stepping to a lectern on a frigid afternoon after he signed the bill into law, Biden spoke about the history of lynching in America and the long process of outlawing it, addressing Till’s loved ones and others who pushed for anti-lynching legislation throughout the country’s history.

“Thank you for never, ever giving up,” he said, declaring that the new law “is not just about the past.”

Biden described the “bullets in the back of Ahmaud Arbury,” a 25-year-old Black man shot and killed by two white men in 2020 while jogging through his Georgia neighborhood, as evidence that the law is “about the future as well.”