The circumstances surrounding the death of Emmett Till provide chilling insight into the racism that dominated the South in the 1950s. Till was a fourteen-year-old Chicago native visiting relatives in Mississippi. While out with his cousins and friends on the night of August 24, 1955, he allegedly "accosted" a white woman in the grocery store owned by her husband, Roy Bryant. Accounts vary as to what Till actually said or did. According to the woman Till grabbed her and made lewd remarks. Some witnesses claimed that he only whistled at her.
Roy Bryant considered his wife's honor tainted by the incident. Several nights after the episode, Bryant, his half brother J. W. Milam, and possibly other accomplices kidnapped Till from his relatives' home in the middle of the night. A key witness was 18-year-old sharecropper Willie Reed, who said that on the morning after Till was abducted, he saw Emmett on a truck with six people: Bryant, Milam, two other white men, and two black men who worked for Milam. The two men beat him severely, beyond recognition and, apparently enraged that he had a picture of a white woman in his wallet, shot Till in the head and threw him in a nearby river. Several days later the body was found, and Bryant and Milam were charged with murder. Till's mother, showing great courage, insisted on an open casket at his funeral, "to show the world what they did to my son".
Mississippi politicians and newspapers publicly condemned the murderers and promised swift justice. The highly publicized trial of the two men was charged with racial tension. African-American politicians and reporters from the North were treated as outsiders and were segregated in the courtroom. The prosecution was poorly prepared, and the substance of the defense was the astounding claim that Till was not actually dead. The badly decomposed body was identified only by Till's ring on his finger. The sheriff of Tallahatchee County, who investigated the case, speculated on the witness stand that an unnamed group of so-called "rabble-rousers" had planted the evidence. The all-male, all-white jury was apparently convinced: they acquitted Bryant and Milam after deliberating slightly longer than one hour.
Lynchings were often public spectacles: Crowds of whites gathered and cheered on unspeakable acts of torture and savagery. Many parents brought their kids. Some participants would send postcards of the events back home to friends and relatives. Others would vie for souvenirs like a finger or another body part. Few of the perpetrators of these acts were ever identified or brought to trial. Many of the unfortunate victims of these heinous, racially motivated, acts of cowardice, remain anonymous to this day.
The truth of what happened that night became public knowledge several months after the trial. William Bradford Huie, an Alabama journalist in Mississippi to report on the aftermath of the case, offered Bryant and Milam money to tell their story. Since the two could no longer be prosecuted for a crime of which they had already been acquitted, they gladly told for a fee of how they had beaten and killed young Till. Huie reported what the killers told him in the 24 January 1956 issue of Look magazine. Now publicly exposed as murderers, Bryant and Milam were ostracized by the community, and both moved elsewhere within a year. Emmett Till in death became a martyr for the civil rights movement, a symbol of race based persecution of African-Americans.
Both Milam and Bryant are now deceased. However, it is believed that others who participated in the crime are still alive today. In May 2004, the Justice Department, calling the 1955 prosecution a "grotesque miscarriage of justice," reopened the murder investigation. In June 2005, the FBI exhumed Till's body and had an autopsy performed. The case is still considered...OPEN!
Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it!
As the economic climate continues to spiral downward people will look for someone to blame. They will look for someone to vent there frustrations against. When they review socio-economic policies, when the media portrays us as being the largest beneficiaries of their hard earned dollars via welfare, and socialized medical care, we will become the focus of their contempt. We must anticipate our circumstances turning tenuous at best. Who will protect us?, the law?, the police? Police are being fired at alarming rate in urban areas across this country. We must forget our trivial differences and accept the mentality of The Village and initiate action to protect ourselves. We must empower ourselves. Our very survival may depend on it
No comments:
Post a Comment