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Bill honoring Emmett Till spurs some bipartisanship
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by angryindian | June 19, 2007 at 10:46 am
898 views | 10 Recommendations | 1 comment
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Finally, someone is willing to at least appear to give a damn. - The Angryindian
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Who says bipartisanship is dead?Emmett2 Well, actually, a lot of people do. And they’re mainly correct. But every now and then, some animating force—a just cause, a moving story, an unexpected event—will, for better or worse, bring warring political parties into alignment. This week, for the better, that force was Emmett Till.
In 1955, Till, a 14-year-old black kid from Chicago spending a summer with his family in the South, was savagely murdered by two white men who dumped his body into the Mississippi Delta. The crime was reprehensible and the suspects clearly culpable, but nonetheless a jury of 12 white men found them innocent. They also touched off the civil rights movement.
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at 08:46 on September 5th, 2007
An event in American history worth noting, Angryindian! Although there may be thousands of unsolved murders of African Americans that occurred from shortly after Reconstruction until only a few decades ago, with nearly all of the dead being listed as having died 'at the hands of party or parties unknown', Emmett Till's was not one of them.
After their acquittal, Milam and Bryant sold the story of how they abducted Emmett from his relative's home in Mississippi and murdered him to Look Magazine. Emmett's mother, Mamie Till, refused to leave his casket unopened as she had been instructed to do by the Mississippi authorities when his remains were returned to Chicago.
"I think everybody needed to see what happened to Emmett Till," she said. More than 50,000 filed past his casket in 1955. Fourteen year old Emmett was murdered one week after his mother put him on the train to Mississippi.