Potent quotables
Mississippi outstripped the rest of the nation in virtually every measure of lynching: the greatest number of lynchings, the most lynchings per capita, the most lynchings without an arrest or conviction, the most female victims, the most multiple lynchings, and on and on.
“This was the first time I had ever really spoken to Emmett about race.” Perhaps. “After all, how do you give a crash course in hatred to a boy who has only known love?”
I took the privacy of my own grief and turned it into a public issue, a political issue, one which set in motion the dynamic force that ultimately led to a generation of social and legal progress for this country.
“Used to be they would charge us with clubs and chase us off the grass,” one of the men told Brown, “but they know we ain’t running no damn where this time.”
He was not a violent man, but he intended to sleep in peace on his own property.
One answer might be that no African American took the stand for the prosecution without having first thought deeply about what doing so was going to ask of them then and thereafter. In unique ways each had already wrestled with the question of how they would live with the consequences of their testimony.
“It’s getting to be a strange thing,” said Howard, “that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for killings of Negroes in the South.”
We blame them to avoid seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.
“We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Police brutality against men and women of color provided the most urgent grievance but represented a range of festering racial problems: the criminalization of black bodies; the militarization of law enforcement; mass incarceration; racial injustice in the judicial system; the chasms of inequality between black and white and rich and poor; racial disparities in virtually every measure of well-being, from employment and education to health care.
White America’s heritage of imagining blacks as fierce criminals, intent on political and sexual domination, as threatening bodies to be monitored and controlled, has never disappeared.
The most successful killers of African American youth are poverty, resegregated and neglected public schools, gang violence, and lack of economic opportunities.