Emmett Till

Top of the Stack. 

Emmett Till is back in the news. This being the case, the inevitable comparisons of Till with Trayvon Martin will start up again. My purpose is to provide you with some background so that you can appreciate just how inane the comparisons are that assimilate the defensible killing of Martin by George Zimmerman to the unspeakably brutal and unjust torture and slaying of Till. Anyone who assimilates the two is not exaggerating, but lying shamelessly.   To understand this one need only know the essentials of each case. 

Comments

[EG]

Bill,

What most struck you about the story of Till? And, if I can what is your feeling and sense of where we are in the sorts of hatreds and othering that can occur with anyone who is a Till, or was this more of a singular event?

[BV]

Till was 12-year-old boy from Chicago , naive, unversed in the ways of the world, and in particular, he was ignorant of the honor codes of the South which live on there today albeit in diluted forms. Some say Till asked for trouble. No. He made a mistake due to youth and inexperience and paid a terrible price.

A singular event? No. See *Honor and Violence in the Old South,* Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Oxford UP, 1986 for an an account of ante-bellum Southern mores.