Mississippi county apologizes over Till.
The county where Chicago teenager Emmett Till’s body was found after he allegedly whistled at a white woman officially apologized Tuesday for the way the crime was handled, more than 50 years after the boy died.
Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors and Sheriff William Brewer Jr. signed the resolution that included an apology to Till’s family. They also unveiled a marker commemorating the 14-year-old’s death.
‘’We felt that this community needed to speak,'’ Supervisor Jerome Little said in a phone interview. ‘’Books have been written, stories have been told, documentaries have been made and the community of Tallahatchie has never said a word about the trial and how it played a major role in it.'’
You think it’s annoying that stories about Till’s death always seem to feel it necessary to mention that Till “allegedly” whistled at a “white woman”? Just wait until you read this. (No link, because it’s an SPLC-identified hate site.)
[Reader Letter to VDARE] I’m sitting here looking at photo of Emmett Till in his coffin. He has one eye and a mouth that is a jagged gash. His hair is mostly gone and it’s obvious that something has been eating his flesh. Pre MLK America didn’t need redemption, it needed destroying and thank God that it was.
[Former Forbes editor] Peter Brimelow responds:
I know I’m supposed to feel guilty about this, but (possibly because I’m an unassimilated immigrant) I don’t. Instead, I wonder what the four white victims of the December 2000 Wichita Massacre looked like…
VDARE.COM does not, as it happens, advocate lynching. But it cannot be denied that Till was lynched for what would now be called the sexual harassment of a white woman. And elementary math suggests that, in the almost five decades since his death, up to 1.5 million white women may have been raped by blacks. Perhaps 50,000 whites may have been killed.
I quoted this once before, when I was at Malkin(s)watch. There wasn’t much I could say about it then, and there’s not much I can say about it now.
For some reason, though, I thought of all this when I read this post by David Schraub (via Kevin:
I’ve noticed…a meme that floats around the conservative right that tries to split the “good” civil rights activists of the 60s, whose cause was laudable and just (though not, it’s worth noting, during the 60s themselves, as anyone who has read National Review articles from that time knows) from the next generation of Black leaders, who are charlatans and “race-baiters.” Dr. King is the emblem of the former group, and perhaps its only political member; virtually no other civil rights pioneer of that era gets similar treatment. Dr. King serves as an apt model because he is quite conveniently dead, and thus unable to take positions that might be inopportune for his more conservative supporters…
…Martin Luther King is a useful tool for justifying racism because he died so young. Being dead, he can’t contest or contextualize the actual content of his beliefs. Being dead, he can’t remind audiences of the criticisms and abuse he was subjected to during his campaigns, and how it is eerily reminiscent of the charges foisted upon contemporary Black leaders. And being dead, he is no longer a political threat, and thus is a safe person to prop up upon an altar and praise. Were he alive, we might be faced with the uncomfortable prospect that this great hero of American history might demand we actually fulfill our covenant with Black citizens…
You should go read the whole thing. That’s really why I wrote this post in the first place. But the thing that the Emmitt Till case, and the long overdue apology - which, by the way, contained an awful lot of “Sorry if you were hurt”-type dissembling - reminds us is that if King was a radical, if Malcolm X was a radical, if Thurgood Marshall and Stokely Carmichael were radicals, well - look at what they were fighting against.
And now nooses appear in trees again, in Jena and the Coast Guard and Pittsburgh and they’re called pranks and Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are called “race pimps” (an update, as Schraub notes about “race baiter”, of the civil-rights-era favorite “agitator”) because they yell about justice and yell about racism and yell, yell, yell. And meanwhile Emmitt Till looks up at us from the coffin, a representative of 3448 others and the countless others who spent their life in fear of the very same treatment, the terrorism worked, it worked, and yet somehow hanging nooses is a prank.
When I try to wrap my head around the mindset which thinks that hanging nooses is a prank, my brain revolts. First it tries to think of analogies, of “things that hanging nooses is like” but discards them all as either insufficiently awful or too grandiose. Then it tries to figure out a way to explain to a potentially hostile audience why, even though the rope has been quiet for 39 26 years, the days of lynching are far from over and the fear instilled by the noose is not dampened by “a generation”, quotes intentional. Then it tries to think about Britney Spears’ kids, because it’s an American brain, dammit. And then it writes something like the paragraph above this one, or the paragraph below, and hits Publish before it obsesses over it all too much.
It’s amazing to me that most conservative racists, being good churchgoing folks, are so anxious to accept the idea of “original sin”, the idea that when we are born we are doomed simply because of one moment of evildoing by our ancestors in the human race 6,013 years ago and that we have to arrange our lives entirely around that one moment of weakness - but faced with the actions of their (and our) parents and grandparents and the perpetuation of the system by they (and us) themselves they scream and cry about how long they, as innocent white people, are going to have to remain in this race-pimp purgatory, forever subjected to the horrible guilt peddled by Messrs. Jackson and Sharpton and Lewis for something they just didn’t do.
And then they go hang another noose, even if it’s only figurative.
38 Responses to “From the about freaking time department”
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Amen.
Excellent post.
You know your problem, though. You’ve forgotten that conservatives only consider things as really real problems/crimes if they happen to real people — white guy American folks, I mean.
Awesome. The last paragraph especially.
Great post.
Very small bone: I do, in fact, find Sharpton to be a rank opportunist. I personally refrain from the ugly term “race-baiter” — or at least reserve it for people like the hicks who hung the nooses in Jena — but Sharpton’s ultimately a self-promoter and not much else, plain and simple. That’s just my strong personal impression of one individual dude. So.
I think the real civil-rights warriors of today tend to operate on a more local level, and are less visible and certainly not celebrities in the way civil-rights leaders of past generations were. Jackson comes close, but he doesn’t have the same kind of charisma — the aura of historical inevitability — that attended, say, Malcolm X.
It’s weird to read the words “sexual harassment” in this context, because the idea that there is a “sexual harassment” and that it is wrong has no bearing on lynching or those who defend it. Whistling at white women was contextualized as a crime not because sexism is wrong, but more like catching someone keying your car—wrong because the white women are property and whistling at them, flirting with them, etc. is offensive in the same way that sitting at white lunch counters or sitting in the front of the bus was offensive. It’s just weird to see a term invented by people interested in justice being used to justify the ugliest form injustice has quite possibly taken in the past 100 years within our borders.
Bunnies for seroj…
Yeah, Seroj, because becoming a rock star and a local hero who will probably be elected President one day because someone fingered you by mistake in a police lineup is exactly the same thing as being lynched at the age of 14 for looking at someone of a different race. Good goddess.
Can I has furry woodland creatures now, please?
God’s right. (First, last time I say that.) For better or worse, the idea of a “civil rights leader” has changed. Progressive movements—all movements, really—find momentum in common goals. The legal harassment and tolerance of lynching of the mid-century gave the civil rights movement a banner to work under, and once those goals were accomplished, people split up into smaller groups with different priorities.
This is not a bad thing.
I repeat, this is not a bad thing.
Buying into the idea that different groups with different priorities working beside each other is somehow not as good as everyone marching under the same banner is feeding the anti-left agenda. We can see ourselves as complements, not competitors. People who tackle the oppression of black people through different strategies help each other out. In fact, having one leader is dangerous, because that means that if that leader is taken out (as MLK was), then it will be chaotic and hard to regroup. A diverse and leaderless movement is one that’s harder to kill. It’s the hydra vs. the dragon argument.
I’d like to think that the county took this step because they saw the ugliness that was unleashed in Jena and recoiled from it.
I can never know for sure, but I’d like to believe it.
“I’d like to think that the county took this step because they saw the ugliness that was unleashed in Jena and recoiled from it.”
The question then would be why they recoiled - fear or shame?
If shame, maybe somebody’s learned something and we’re making progress.
If fear, it could be a temporary “change of heart” that will disappear as soon as they feel in a superior position again…
I don’t think it’s completely insane to suggest that the nooses might have been intended as a “prank” or a “joke”. After all, high school kids do ill-considered and hurtful things all the time because they think those things might be funny.
The thing that’s insane is to fail to recognize that even if the nooses were hung with “merely” prankful intent there’s something deeply wrong in the environment there if white kids are treating lynching as a joking matter. Hell, there’s something deeply wrong with the whole premise of the prank, that there was a “white tree” and it was a problem if black kids sat under it.
No matter what the “pranksters” were thinking, their actions should have been taken seriously by school officials and an attempt should have been made to find out who was responsible and convey to them and to all students that such actions will not be tolerated. And the school should have made it clear long before occasion for this “prank” arose that having segregated shade trees is also unacceptable.
Jena’s racial environment was clearly fucked well before the nooses were hung. And someting should have been done a long time ago. This “prank” just brought it out into the daylight. All this nonsense about how it was “just a prank” is a smokescreen being thrown up to avoid addressing the real issues.
I can’t get over the way they speculate that 1.5 million women have been harassed by blacks, as if white men are parfait gentil chevalier. I don’t know why but it’s like….they’re toting up the damage to their property and assessing the amount of revenge they’re entitled to because those women are their property. It just so perfectly sums them up.
Hey, Auguste! Has Malkin ever explained why a Philipino anchor baby like herself writes for a White-Supremacist blog?
Jena’s racial environment was clearly fucked well before the nooses were hung. And someting should have been done a long time ago. This “prank” just brought it out into the daylight. All this nonsense about how it was “just a prank” is a smokescreen being thrown up to avoid addressing the real issues.
A friend of mine has family near Jena, and he described the place by saying that the only good reason to go there was to hold a protest–not the finest of places. And the worst part about it is that nothing will change as a result of this, except perhaps for the divide to harden. The white people who claimed the town wasn’t racist aren’t going to change their minds, unless it’s to become even more racist and claim they were driven to it by uppity black folks.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/6685441.stm is a bbc article one should read. It does provide some details about the disparity of blacks and whites in Jena.
It was found out who put up the nooses. The school superintendent wanted to expel the students who did it but instead they recieved a slap on the wrist.
Being sent to an alternative school is a slap on the wrist as far as kids are concerned today. It’s just another high school and a lot of kids consider it a mark of pride.
As for seroj he needs to see the vids of the bunnies for the sequal where the rabbits invade the Earth.
1.5 million? Holy crap. That’s probably one of the most insanely completely and totally full of shit things I’ve heard in a LONG time.
Anne:What SHOULD have happened, is when the black community of Jena had their non-violent protest, the community would rally around them and use the incident as a way of moving on.
But one common aspect of bullying (and to be honest, the Jena case is a textbook example of bullying) is the ability to use the levers of power not just to ignore the bullying, but to actually bully themselves.
“VDARE.COM does not, as it happens, advocate lynching.”
Hahahahahahahaha, that’s a good one. Sort of like how littlegreenfootballs “thinks most Muslims are good people.”
“Instead, I wonder what the four white victims of the December 2000 Wichita Massacre looked like…”
Gosh, you mean the crime for which the two perpetrators were sentenced to death, unlike Emmett Till’s killers, who got off scot-free and even got paid for interviews where they described in detail how they’d killed him?
Yes, I agree, getting the death penalty is a much lesser punishment than walking away from the courtroom a free man and profiting from your crime. Gee, thanks for clearing that up.
Asshat.
Mnemosyne - I found your post delicious.
I think that confining the problem to Jena or the South just emboldens the terrorists. The Jena lynch-rope apologists have the mindset that they’re being picked on for being a small Southern town and that everything was actually alright before the liberal media came and Created the Race Problem. i think the problem is that yes, Virginia, even though there are more sophisticated kinds of racism today, there is *still* low-tech racist violence going on today that even schoolkids who can’t tell you about Emmett Till know how to engage in.
Now do these towns have TV, do they have the printing press? Because if they don’t, i’ll believe that the problem is with these towns. But if they do, i guarantee that they have the exact same problem that the rest of the country has.
A noose is a death threat, plain and simple. There are many ways to express a death threat, but a noose has sufficient history behind it to be suitably symbolic. As for the power of the “historical” reference, all you have to do is mention the swastika and most people should get the point. Anyone who doesn’t get the point after that comparison is probably on The Other Side anyway.
I think the only good analogies to the noose “prank” would have to be individual and personal.
Suppose your father died of lung cancer when you were nine years old, and some merry prankster gave you a carton of cigarettes on your birthday, with a card signed, “See you soon! Dad”
I’m thinking that *might* hurt as much as seeing the stark symbol of lynching swinging in front of your school. Maybe.
A lot of this probably falls into the category of what I call “stupid racism.” Hey, it’s fun to piss off the black kids, let’s grab something like a noose and string it up! (Ignoring the very symbolism of what a noose MEANS to black people….) If there were Jews, these twits would have probably thought it funny to scrawl swastikas on their bookbags.
That’s the level of cerebral thought I think went into this. The ugly stuff was what the adults did in reaction…and the disparities between what was meted out to the black kids and the white kids.
Oh, and since it took the Catholic Church over 400 years to apologize for what they did to Galileo, I consider maybe we’re improving slightly….
But yes, about freakin’ time.
it cannot be denied that Till was lynched for what would now be called the sexual harassment of a white woman
Great. There wouldn’t be a white man left alive if Till’s whistling deserved lynching.
Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will was a seminal work that changed many people’s thinking about rape. But the one thing that troubled me about that book was her treatment of the Till case. While expressing revulsion over what happened to Till, she painted him almost as an incipient rapist, and implicitly blamed him for the “rape the white girls” trope that emerged from black activists like Eldridge Cleaver.
This is the sort of thing that contributed to the unfortunate perception in some quarters of feminism as a “white women’s movement.” Very sad, especially since Cleaver was an abusive jerk who should never have been taken seriously.
It’s easy to pretend that groups like VDARE represent only a tiny fringe of American politics, but the fact is that we’ve regressed quite a bit over the past quarter century. Today, African Americans pay more for car loans and home loans, even after controlling for the smaller paychecks they get as a result of job discrimination.
Our schools have been re-segregating for a couple of decades, and this year the Supreme Court handed down a decision that virtually overturned the 1954 Brown v. Board decision. And this year, they’ll consider the question of whether a company can legally fire a person who complains about discrimination.
About the only thing that makes VDARE different from the mainstream of the Republican party is the fact that VDARE doesn’t bother with the code words and the pro forma platitudes about Martin Luther King.
I’m not getting all sentimental about Mississippi County’s expressions of sorry about Emmit Till, not this late in the day, no.
The focus over the years has embarrassed the locals some and appropriately made them out as a bunch of ignorant barbarians, which racist supporters are. But like a teen age boy being caught jacking off in the basement, yeah, its embarrassing, but say a few right things and then everyone is over it.
Not so, thousands of people of color are dead due to terrorism, many thousand more died building the economic base of this country with their sweat and blood and one county saying, “Oh yeah, sorry dude.” doesn’t cut serve satisfactory apology or recompense in my mind.
Amanda, your comparison to the attitude toward Original Sin and Real Life Sin Today was great.
I also wish to add though that like all over this country, then and now, black men have always been a threat to white folk, coming from antebellum culture when white masters often considered their black male slaves as competition for not only the availability of other slave women (which many masters raped and/or took as mistresses), but also as competition for the attention of the white women of the big house.
As well, division of black and white among all lines kept the largely black majority from mingling with the poor whites whose hatred of large plantation owners wasn’t far behind that of the slaves.
Emmitt’s behavior had nothing to do with the concept of real sexual assault as it had to do with making sure that everyone knew their place at all times.
And I like Al Sharpton, I think he’s he sharp, he’s tough and so what if he likes the fucking lime light, more power to him I say!
“VDARE doesn’t advocate lynching” = “I’m not a racist, but. . .”
In fact, it’s worse.
Who would say “I don’t advocate raping women to death, but. . .” unless they were actually rapists?
VDARE clearly advocates lynching or they wouldn’t need to deny it.
“Who would say “I don’t advocate raping women to death, but. . .” unless they were actually rapists?
VDARE clearly advocates lynching or they wouldn’t need to deny it. ”
Even better analogy than the LGF one I used.
It reminds me of how one fella I know (a lawyer from a top-tier educational background who should know better) said “I would never let my daughter date LeBron James because he has an illegitimate child…and no, it has nothing to do with his being black.”
No one in that discussion had even brought up LeBron’s race; the fact the person even pre-emptively mentioned it says all you even need to know.
“I know I’m supposed to feel guilty about this, but (possibly because I’m an unassimilated immigrant) I don’t. Instead, I wonder what the four white victims of the December 2000 Wichita Massacre looked like…
VDARE.COM does not, as it happens, advocate lynching. But it cannot be denied that Till was lynched for what would now be called the sexual harassment of a white woman. And elementary math suggests that, in the almost five decades since his death, up to 1.5 million white women may have been raped by blacks. Perhaps 50,000 whites may have been killed.”
Disclaimer: any parallels to fascist propaganda in the early 20th century are unintentional and purely coincidental.
I think it’s possible to both think that Emmett Till must have been an obnoxious teenager who was expressing male entitlement - but who absolutely didn’t deserve what happened to him. (My view of the incident is colored by Susan Brownmiller’s take on it in Against Our Will, I admit - though trying to claim she even implicitly blamed him for the “rape the white girls” trope” is a serious misreading.)
You have a boy hanging out with his friends in the local store, who is dared by his friends to talk to the woman running the store, and who says “Bye baby” and wolf-whistles at the woman. That’s obnoxious and annoying. It’s male entitlement and men-in-groups egging each other on to make clear to a woman that she is there for them, not the other way about.
Saying this is not saying that Emmet Till “provoked” what happened to him - one, if he’d been a white kid, this would have been let go as “boys will be boys” (male privilege to be obnoxious), two, as Amanda noted, Emmet got lynched because he was a black kid who was presuming to a male privilege that only a white kid was “entitled” to - the right to harass and make uncomfortable a white woman. (And the notion that she was only made uncomfortable because he was black? That was obviously a part of it - but if he’d been a white kid, hanging out with his friends and going “hey baby” and wolf-whistling, she might never have complained - but I can’t imagine it wouldn’t have made her feel uncomfortable. That kind of behavior isn’t pleasant for its target.)
Ignoring the male/female privilege axis in this would be a mistake. Arguing that what Emmet Till did was not obnoxious would be a mistake. Trying to leap from that to “he deserved it” would be an inhuman crime: claiming that this is what I’m saying would be a serious misreading. What Emmet Till did was deliberately obnoxious, and it should go without saying that he did not “deserve” to die for it or be beaten for it.
I’d add to Jer’s point that the trumped-up anger over white women’s “purity” had zero to do with any actual sense of women having dignity worth protecting. It was a property issue and is best understood as white people protecting their “me first” privileges. Whites had their own water fountains, lunch counters—it was a slogan at the time that no “coloreds” should have jobs before all white men did—and that sense that black people shouldn’t have access to white people’s property extended to the white man’s sexual access to white women.
It’s interesting how the woman in the Till case gets blamed for his fate. In fact, she did not tell anyone what he did; his cousins did, probably because the woman’s husband and brother beat them severely. They weren’t concerned for her as a person; she was their property. It was an honor killing, reversed. Instead of killing the woman, this was a case where the male had less status so they felt free to kill him—two adult males against one child. To them he was male, adn she was not human. It was like weeding to them. Had she been damaged, she would have been replaced or tossed out.
Honor killings are lynchings of women, while lynchings are reverse honor killings. Usually it’s women who die. It seems to be unique to America, too, this killing of a lower-status to revenge a higher status woman—even if she didn’t exist in a lot of the cases. Where there was an actual woman, it’s like the white men in the case couldn’t bear to have another man play with their toys. I’m sure the guys who murdered Emmitt Till were absolute sweethearts at home, too, kind of like Mafia guys who kill and torture during the day and then come home to dinner at night.
I wonder how many lynchings were the result of some white woman and some black guy getting together and realizing they had way more in common than white women and white guys did. I mean, who wants to be that Mafia wife? Who wants to be the wife of the guy who killed a fourteen-year-old boy? How many of these good ole boys were the sort to kill their wives if they were unfaithful? How is this any different from, say, the mob that killed the Iraqi girl in the street a while back? The property is getting rebellious. You can always get more property, but there’s always somebody else who wants it. In the Middle East the property gets destroyed because it’s broken and there’s lots more women out there. In the US, protecting the property or punishing its thief was a big huge production, made the more fearsome by the fact that white guys could and did just make shit up out of whole cloth. White guys always have to think they’re in control and that they own other people. Those nooses in the tree were a reminder that white guys never stop wanting that and remembering that they once had it.
Where did the “Your comment is in moderation” thing go? That was helpful. I’m not sure if I should worry or wait.
Defining women as property has to come first in a situation like this. Women have always been property. In other cultures, such property is easily replaced and so it’s annoying when women start to think they’re people. A few killings here and there and women get the message: you’re not human. Here in the US we have this long history of men proclaiming that they’re the protectors of women—while shouting down women who want to protect themselves, thank you very much—–when what protection means is you’re just paying some strongman in whatever currency you’ve got. The notion that women are property is still strong in the US, but it’s only been lower class women that have been executed in the US for getting uppity—see Women who Kill by Ann Jones. Women are consumer goods here. Other men are potential shoplifters of those goods. White men have always feared black men as other men, maybe fearing in those other men the same mindset of women-as-trophy-to-be-fought-over.
Last serial comment, but is anybody else thinking of old Westerns or whatever where two guys fight over a woman, with the woman given absolutely no input into the decision at all?
Unfortunately, it hasn’t been that long. Michael Donald was lynched in 1981.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Donald
Only 26 yrs ago. I’m 24
I’m sure the guys who murdered Emmitt Till were absolute sweethearts at home, too, kind of like Mafia guys who kill and torture during the day and then come home to dinner at night.
Obnoxious as the movie was (”Look at the heroic FBI agents solve racism!”), the one thing that Mississippi Burning got right was the position that women were in during the same time period. The scene where Frances McDormand’s husband attacks her for talking to the FBI is horrifying.
It’s a crappy movie about civil rights, but it’s one of the best portrayals of racist people I’ve seen on the movie screen.