Black people in Maryland will now know about the level of racist threats they face with a new alert system named after Emmett Till, a 14-year-old who was lynched after being accused of making a pass at a white woman in Jim Crow Mississippi in the 1950s.

The most recent FBI data show hate crimes were at the highest level in 12 years. About 62 percent of victims of hate crimes in 2020 were targeted because of their race or ethnicity, the report shows. According to Maryland’s hate bias report, there was an average of 381 incidents each year from 2018 to 2020. More than half of the 332 victims of hate bias in the state in 2020 were Black, the report shows.

The Emmett Till Alert system went into effect this week and will notify Black leaders in Maryland of verified hate crimes and racist incidents. Leaders said the system will be in the same spirit of Emmett’s mother, who decided to have an open-casket funeral to show the damage his killers caused because of hate. The case was a seminal moment in the the civil rights movement. Black Maryland leaders hope it would bring similar awareness to racial violence in the state.

The FBI identifies a hate crime as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”

“When the FBI director said often that the greatest domestic terrorism threat is white supremacists, we have to take hate crimes and terrorist threats seriously,” said Carl Snowden of the Caucus of African American Leaders during a news conference announcing the system on Aug. 22.

A team of people would validate the reports before the alerts are sent out to 167 elected officials in Maryland and civil rights organizations, clergy members and other leaders nationwide. The system would send out the alerts via email and text based on three levels: low, medium and high — the highest alert signals a great likelihood of violence or death, NPR reports.


”Not all hate crimes are investigated. Not all hate crimes are reported for a variety of reasons. What we are going to do is make sure every hate crime that we’re made aware of goes out on this alert system,” Snowden said.

Maryland Black leadership hopes the system becomes a model for other states.

“Once they’re able to identify the incidents, they’ll really be able to rally and raise that awareness and communicate with different community leaders, activists and politicians,” said Sara Pratley, vice president of global intelligence for AlertMedia, the company behind the system.

FBI data showed racist attacks targeting Black people increased to 2,871 from 1,972 nationwide in 2020. Among recent attacks was the Buffalo, New York, mass shooting that killed 10 Black in a grocery store in May. Data collected by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism from 15 major city police departments in the country show an average increase of about 5 percent in bias-motivated incidents so far this year.

Historically Black colleges and universities across the nation —including three in Maryland — received bomb threats in January and February. The FBI has yet to indict any suspects for the threats.