Emmett Till Never Even Whistled

Maximus Meridius said:

It's always funny how this black men raping or attacking white women myth has been pushed forever but people never talk about the rape of black women by white men that went on for hundreds of years during slavery. This country's "heroes"were rapist but won't none of these fake feminist groups speak on that.

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KingKoopa said:

Its a battle Im really tired of fighting.

Remember tellin this before.

In my predominantly black school.

Our AA history class was a 1 semester elective taught by our white HS wrestling coach :x

Our history has to be self taught and by the time you realize that it's only a few who take the time to do it.

History books in school touched on a white washed MLK and George Washington Carver and his peanuts.

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RUSTLENOMICS said:

 
according to a certain demographic, black folks need to push their injustice aside and focus on others 

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FLYKNIT said:

Wish they could charge her or something and throw her old *** in jail

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Peep Game said:

It is. Was there for track meets twice a year for 4 years. Really ****** place. The white folks look at you like you have the nerve to have freedom, and the black folks from there act like the gun line prison snitch from Life.

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Maximus Meridius said:

But Perl Harbor, 911, we must always remember.


Hell they won't forget OJ.

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On a warm August night in 1955, Simeon Wright woke to the sound of unfamiliar voices. Opening his eyes, he found two white men standing at the foot of his bed, holding a flashlight and gun.

They were after Wright’s cousin — 14-year-old Emmett Till — who was still asleep beside him but would soon be kidnapped, brutally murdered and dumped into a river.

It was memories of that historically infamous night that Wright, who died on Monday, quietly carried with him until publishing his firsthand account in a 2010 book. Wright died on Monday morning from complications from bone cancer at his home in Countryside, Ill., according to the Chicago Tribune. He was 74 and is survived by his wife and extended family.

Wright was 12 years old and living in Money, Miss., when his cousin visited from Chicago in the summer of 1955. He was there for the moments of that visit that would transform Till from an innocent teenager to the face of Southern Jim Crow violence and brutality throughout the civil rights era, down to this day.

The two were together when Till allegedly whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, at the convenience store she owned with her husband, Roy. Wright said Till was “always joking around” and was likely trying to get a laugh out of his cousins. But the whistle struck Wright, who feared the overwhelming presence of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, to the core. Chicago magazine quoted Wright as saying the joke “scared us half to death … A black boy whistling at a white woman? In Mississippi? No.”

The group promised not to tell Wright’s father about the incident, expecting that he would rush Till out of town if he ever found out.

But it was at 2 a.m. on Aug. 28 that Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, arrived at the Wrights’ home. They snatched Till from the bed he shared with Wright. Till’s beaten body was later found in the Tallahatchie River, along with a 75-pound cotton-gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire.

Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of Emmett Till, pauses at her son’s casket at a Chicago funeral home in 1955. (Chicago Sun-Times/AP)

The horrific scene became an instant symbol of racial violence. Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, arranged for her son’s body to be on display at the funeral, allowing photographers to capture lasting images of an anguished mother and her mutilated child.

Bryant and Milam went on trial for murder, with Wright’s father even identifying them in court. But they were acquitted by an all-white jury, despite later confessing to the crime in Look magazine.

The Wrights soon left Mississippi for the Chicago suburbs. As recounted in Chicago magazine, Wright got into plenty of fights after the move. He wasn’t meek in the face of slurs from white boys. Still, he graduated from Argo High School in 1962 and worked as a pipe fitter, according to the Chicago Tribune.

In his 20s, Wright found a kind of comfort in Christianity, even forgiving his cousin’s killers. Later in life he was a deacon in the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ, according to Chicago magazine. The church was pastored by Till’s cousin and founded by his maternal grandmother.

In a Chicago Tribune obituary, Wright’s wife, Annie Wright, said her husband “got through it with the Lord’s help,” adding that he focused his energy on mentoring young boys and teaching them how to navigate life’s setbacks.

Simeon Wright speaks at a news conference on Aug. 28, 2009, at the church where his cousin’s funeral was held in Chicago. (M. Spencer Green/AP)

Even with his newfound spirituality, Wright said he was haunted by historical inaccuracies surrounding Till’s death. His co-authored book,“Simeon’s Story: An Eyewitness Account of the Kidnapping of Emmett Till,” aims to clarify eyewitness accounts and other reports that lived on decades after the lynching, including the fact that Till’s wallet did not contain a photo of a white girl and that Till did not address Bryant on a dare.

The book was also an eloquent, albeit chilling, recounting of life for a young black man in the Jim Crow era.

“Any black person brave enough to violate this system,” he writes, “was immediately confronted by angry white men, usually with murder on their minds. There was nothing more feared in the South than one of those lynch mobs, which was invariably protected by the sheriff and his deputies — when they weren’t part of the mob themselves. For every courageous black man willing to speak out against the circumstances we faced, hundreds of white men were willing and able to make sure he paid the ultimate price.”

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Simeon Booker, a trail-blazing journalist credited with helping bring to national prominence the 1955 death of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago whose brutal murder in Mississippi became a galvanizing point for the nascent civil rights movement, has died at 99.

For decades, he was the Washington bureau chief of the iconic African-American publications Jet, a weekly, and Ebony, a monthly. His story in Jet on Till’s killing included an open-casket picture of the teenager’s mangled face that shocked the nation.

Mr. Booker, who was also the first full-time black reporter for The Washington Post, died Sunday at an assisted-living community in Solomons, Maryland, according to a Post obituary that cited his wife Carol. He had recently been hospitalized for pneumonia.

In a 2013 video tribute upon Mr. Booker’s induction into the National Association for Black Journalists Hall of Fame, former Jet reporter Roy Betts said that Mr. Booker’s coverage of the civil rights movement, “catapulted the movement onto the world stage.”

His reporting from the Deep South placed him in near-constant danger. Tributes to him mention that he sometimes dressed as a minister (complete with Bible) or a farmer to escape detection and one frequently told tale had Mr. Booker escaping from an angry mob in the back of a hearse. He rode in one of the buses to cover the 1961 Freedom Rides, when black activists rode from Washington to New Orleans to challenge a ban on segregated interstate transportation facilities.

Mr. Booker was born in Baltimore and raised in Youngstown, Ohio. He started his journalistic career working for a string of African-American publications. He joined the Post in 1952 but moved on two years later to found the Washington bureau for Johnson Publishing, the parent company of Jet and Ebony.

He served in that position for more than 50 years, authoring the widely read Ticker Tape column, chronicling Washington’s inner workings for a national black readership before retiring in 2007. He covered 10 presidents, traveled abroad to report on the Vietnam War and helped bring Till’s death to a national audience.

After hearing in Chicago that the teenager had disappeared in Money, Mississippi, while visiting relatives, he went to the boy’s mother Mamie Till-Mobley’s home and was with her later when she insisted at the funeral home on an open casket to show the world how her son had been mutilated, it was said, for whistling at a white woman in the Deep South.

In Jet, Booker wrote: “Her face wet with tears, she leaned over the body, just removed from a rubber bag in a Chicago funeral home, and cried out, ‘Darling, you have not died in vain. Your life has been sacrificed for something.’ ”

Though most news organizations did not publish the photo of the boy in the open casket, the image captured by Jet’s David Jackson appeared in the magazine and in other African-American publications.

Mr. Booker authored or co-authored four books, including a 2013 memoir co-written with his wife Carol McCabe Booker, “Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter’s Account of the Civil Rights Movement.”

Mr. Booker was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists’ Hall of Fame in 2013 and received a career George Polk Award for lifetime achievements in journalism and the National Press Club’s Fourth Estate Award.

He is survived by the wife Carol and three children.

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Black lives don't matter.

It is a message that has, for centuries, been woven like thread into the fabric of this nation.

It was there when the Supreme Court said black people had no rights white people were bound to respect, there when Nazi POWs were seated at a Southern diner while black soldiers were sent to the kitchen, there when federal researchers in Tuskegee experimented on unwitting black men to find out what happens when syphilis goes untreated.

It was there when Emmett Till's eye was gouged out and Sam Hose's face was skinned, there when the good people of Valdosta, Georgia, carved Mary Turner's baby from her womb and stomped it into the dirt.

And it is there in Fort Pierce, Florida, where a jury just decided a wrongful death suit against a St. Lucie County Sheriff's deputy.

The deputy, Christopher Newman, was called to the home of the victim, 30-year-old Gregory Vaughn Hill Jr. in January 2014 by a complaint that he was playing his music loudly. Newman and his partner say that when they banged on the door of the garage, where the music was coming from, Hill raised it, gun in hand -- a contention his daughter, who was across the street, denies, according to CNN. She says her father's hands were empty.

The deputies claim they ordered him to drop the weapon, but he closed the door instead. Newman fired through the door, striking Hill three times. He was found with an unloaded gun in his back pocket. Postmortem toxicology tests indicate that he was drunk.

Last week, a federal jury found that Newman did not use excessive force, but that his boss, Sheriff Ken Mascara, was slightly negligent. It awarded Hill's family $4 in damages. But it gets worse. Reasoning that Hill bore 99 percent of the responsibility for his own death, the jury reduced that pittance by 99 percent, leaving his family just four cents.

For the loss of your father, here's four cents.

For the loss of your child, four cents.

For the loss of your fiance, four cents.

For pain and suffering, for mourning and tears, as an expression of our corporate regret for this tragedy, four lousy cents.

The thing is, even if you buy Newman's tale, you are left with a man who answered a loud knocking -- while carrying a firearm in his own home in a right-to-carry state -- then closed the door. Apparently, that's a capital crime now, if you're black.

Better the jury had given his family nothing than to give them four cents. Yes, they'd have been disappointed, but that would have been better than this, a calculated insult on top of a fatal injury.

The message this jury sends is an old one. It is as American as baseball and apple pie, pine tar torches and burning flesh, as American as that great lie about the truths we hold self-evident. The family's attorney, John Phillips, heard it clearly. "This says black lives don't matter," he told CNN.

One thinks of how the conscientious parent of an African-American child spends that child's lifetime refuting that message, trying to keep it from finding purchase in a child's tender psyche. As white conservatives moan piteously about the "racism" they face, all but whipping out a violin and playing "Nobody knows de trouble I've seen" every time the truth hurts their feelings, that parent is teaching his child how to live through a traffic stop.

It is hard work, trying to help a black child value himself in a nation where his worth is ever in question. Now there's this. You can't buy candy for four cents. You can't buy a stick of gum.

But a federal jury just bought Gregory Hill's life.

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hand2handking said:

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hand2handking said:

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nawghtyhare said:

and what would the purpose be
how will justice be served

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the natural mystic said:

isn't the lying harlot still alive? maybe send her to jail for the rest of her life.

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