Thursday was the 70th anniversary of the brutal murder of Emmett Till.
Emmet was a fourteen-year-old boy who, not understanding the racism and reign of terror in the Southern states, made a flippant remark to a white woman. For that he was hunted down and brutally murdered.
After having Till in their custody, they beat him senseless. Then they reportedly made him carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, where the two men gouged out his eye, shot him in the head and tied him by the neck to the apparatus using barbed wire before throwing him into the water.
Nobody ever paid for this terrible crime!
Remembering Emmett Till’s Brutal Murder
This terrible crime was memorialised by both Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs – back when music meant something!
This kind of racism is the result of a mentality.
When I see the racism being stirred up against immigrants I can’t help thinking about poor Emmet Till and the thousands of others like him who were beaten, tortured and lynched.
Populists will scapegoat immigrants and ethnic minorities for their own greed and lust for power.
Emmet Till epitomises where that hate leads! Those racists waved their flags back then and covered their faces with masks. They bayed and threatened. Not much has changed!
The likes of Trump and Farage have opened Pandora’s box for their own ends!
And the fact that Emmett Till was only one of so many that were murdered that way.
horrendous