Refusing to Comply With Structural Racism: From Emmett Till to Sandra Bland

[marmar]

Refusing to Comply With Structural Racism: From Emmett Till to Sandra Bland

Thursday, 30 July 2015 00:00
By Zachary Norris, Truthout | Op-Ed


Like Emmett Till before her, Sandra Bland wound up dead not so much for what she did as for what she didn't do: comply to the structurally racist order of things.

On August 28, 1955, two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, killed 14-year-old Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, after Till reportedly made a flirtatious remark to a white woman. An all-white jury summarily acquitted Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam. Just months later, the two men talked with a reporter and admitted to torturing, killing and mutilating Till.

Till's mother Mamie Till Mobley heroically insisted on a public funeral with an open casket to expose to the world the brutality of what happened to her son. The funeral and images focused national and international attention on lynching and the apartheid character of American life under Jim Crow, and ignited the civil rights movement.

The death of Sandra Bland, while hidden behind the walls of a jail cell, is also galvanizing an already active movement for Black lives. ..................(more)

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/32150-refusing-to-comply-with-structural-racism-from-emmett-till-to-sandra-bland

[yurbud]

1. I didn't realize his killers were tried, acquitted, and then interviewed