Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,916
By This is the grave of Emmett Till.
You know, I don’t really have anything to say here. We all the know the story of Emmett Till. We all know the horrors of lynching and the terribleness of a murderous Jim Crow society that allowed and even encouraged crackers to kill Black men or even small Black boys for supposed violations of the sexual boundaries between the races, boundaries they themselves broke all the time in the culture of sexual assault of Black women that was at Jim Crow’s core. We all know how the death of Till galvanized the nation and was a moment when it looked enough white people cared about civil rights enough that something could be done about the worst treatment of Black people possible. We know how incredibly, unbelievably brave Till’s mother was in demanding an open casket so that the nation could what those racist scumbags had done to her boy.
We also know that we are in far worse shape today than we were when Till was murdered in 1955 at the age of 14 in terms of white people caring about civil rights. We have not returned to the age of lynching yet, thank God. And we aren’t quite back to Jim Crow America yet. But we are sure moving there fast. Even in the Gilded Age, it took years for Jim Crow to be institutionalized. It didn’t happen then any faster than it is happening again now. But white people are pretty much inherently a plague on the planet and one of their victims was Emmett Till. Maybe someday again, whites will be motivated by seeing violence against people of color to do something about it. I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
So I think we have plenty to discuss here without going over an all too short biography of a young boy killed by racist assholes.
Emmett Till is buried in Burr Oak Cemetery, Alsip, Illinois.
If you would like this series to visit other victims of white murders, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charles Hale, murdered in 1911, is in Lawrenceville, Georgia and Maceo Snipes, killed for voting in 1946, is in Butler, Georgia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.