57 Years Apart

“Thar he.”

The black sharecropper Mose Wright identifying the white killer of Emmett Till in open court in Mississippi in 1956.

On Sunday night, August 28 1955, two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, came to the home of Mose Wright, a black sharecropper and local preacher, to kidnap Emmett Till because Till had allegedly flirted with Bryant’s wife. Bryant and Milam, took Till, a 14 year old black youth visiting from Chicago, beat him beyond recognition, shot him and threw him into the Tallahatchie River strapped by barbed-wire to the blade of an industrial fan.

When Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, recovered his body for burial, she insisted on an open casket funeral. She wanted the world to see what she couldn’t describe. The photos in the Chicago Defender of the pulp that had been Till’s face electrified the world.

On Sunday night, February 26, 2012, Trayvon Martin a 17 year old black youth, was walking back to the home where he was staying in central Florida. He was accosted by George Zimmerman, a member of the neighborhood watch, and within 5 minutes Martin was dead with a gunshot wound to his chest.

Two young black men, barely adults, visiting family members, were killed on Sunday nights 57 years apart. Till was kidnapped and killed because Bryant thought Till had whistled at his wife. Martin was killed because he was wearing a hoodie and may have been reaching for a pack of Skittles.

We have come a long way in 57 years.

It isn’t socially acceptable anymore to take a black man, and turn his lynching into a town festival complete with picnics and souvenir postcards. Between 1882 and 1968, 539 blacks were lynched in Mississippi, and 257 blacks were lynched in Florida. (http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html). Many of the victims “crimes” were “insulting” a white women.

Now, in the South, interracial marriage between whites and blacks is above the national average. Black and white interracial marriage rates in Mississippi are in line with the national average. (http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/02/16/the-rise-of-intermarriage/7/#appendix-2-state-and-regional-rates).

But, it is still socially acceptable to be suspicious of a young black man simply because he is a young black man.

In the New York Times, Michael Powell points out the New York Police Department, stopped and frisked over 685,724 New Yorkers in 2011. That is more than the population of the City of El Paso, Texas. Of those, 603,437 (more than the population of Washington, D.C.) were innocent and weren’t charged or cited for any reason. Powell, who is white, asked his two sons, 19 and 24 years old, how many times they had been stopped and frisked.

Neither had.

Powell then asked 8 black male students in his class at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, who were the same age as his sons, the same question. Together they had been stopped a cumulative 92 times. One had even been asked to remove his shoes on the subway. Their only crime had been to be black in the wrong place. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/10/nyregion/reducing-crime-squandering-good-will.html).

Like Powell’s students, Martin was judged not by the content of his character but by the clothes he was wearing combined with the color of his skin. Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s father, warned his son he would be stereotyped and could be the target of violence. “I told him that society is cruel.” (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-04-14/african-american-parents-talk-to-sons-about-race/54258448/1).

The same fear behind “stop and frisk” is the fear behind “stand your ground” in Florida.

In 2005, Florida changed State law to say if you felt threatened in a public area, you didn’t have a “duty to retreat” and you could respond with deadly force. The police would determine if the person stood their ground and the homicide was justifiable. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law). In the five years before “stand your ground” there were an average of 12 justifiable homicides a year. In the five years since the average is 36. (http://www.politifact.com/florida/statements/2012/mar/26/christopher-l-smith/sen-chris-smith-claimed-deaths-due-self-defense-fl/).

The way the police handled Zimmerman fits the way the law is written. They investigated the shooting, they heard from the only surviving witness, and they determined it was a “stand your ground” case and let the suspect go. The law is so broadly written it will be very hard to convict Zimmerman of anything.

When “stop and frisk” meets “stand your ground” a case like Trayvon Martin’s is inevitable.

In 1956, Mississippi’s judicial racism was open for all to see. Few doubted Bryant and Milam would be acquitted. The defense argued that Till was alive, and the body that had been buried in Till’s casket was a corpse stolen and used by the NAACP to create a story. Jury deliberation took 67 minutes. As one juror said: "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop, it wouldn't have taken that long." After Bryant and Milam were acquitted, and protected from further prosecution, they admitted their guilt in an interview in Look magazine.

At the trial of Till’s killers, the Defense argued Mose Wright couldn’t have seen who took Till, because the only light to see by was a flashlight. They asked Wright to identify who took Till from his home that night. Against centuries of fear, and the risk of violent death, Wright stood in the witness stand, pointed at J.W. Milam and said “Thar he.” There he is.

With a thin outstretched hand Wright touched the glacier of fear, and it began to break. Who will touch the glacier this time?