Wednesday, September 13, 2017
I returned to my hometown for the holidays for Thanksgiving the year of the Emmett Till and it was so maddening. Now that I've had a chance to experience life outside my hometown, it's so hard to go back. I have met many a migrant from the South and I have heard what life is like. People in my teeny town in upstate New York have no idea, absolutely none. And yet when I came home for Thanksgiving, there were people in the town that could see why Emmett was brutally murdered. It made me absolutely furious. What excuse is there for a boy to be killed for whistling, if he even did it? There are no good reasons to take someone's life like that. And yet, some people I talked to said they could understand that a white woman was afraid for her life and that maintaining boundaries was important to maintain peace. The last thing they wanted was another civil war or something, and they thought it was better to keep the status quo where there are no uprisings rather than try to change things and make the country explode again. If only they could see what I see...I don't know how anybody can justify the murder of a child.
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June 3
ReplyDeleteI too read about Emmett Till in the newspaper and as I read my blood boiled with anger and my eyes watered up with sadness as I sat in a small cafe in North Carolina. I could not believe what had happened to this innocent child just because of the color of his skin. The disease of racism in this country is killing it. We cannot thrive and be successful as a nation if racism exists--especially to the extent that it does today. Questions arose in my head. Will racism ever cease to exist in this country? How do we even solve the issue of racism in this country? I remember my conversation with Simone and she talked about how the poor white class do not want to be the bottom of society and racism allows poor whites to put black Americans below them in the social hierarchy.
I then overheard a conversation a couple was having about Emmett Till and saying how he deserved it. I had to leave before I lashed out.
I experienced the same divide between the North and the South. It is unbelievable to me that two places within the same country can be so different. I remember having a similar experience when the Emmett Till case surfaced. I was in Chicago, grieving and trying to understand what could possible prompt someone to do this with hundreds of other people, but at the same time, I was receiving phone calls from my family and friends down south who were justifying the actions of the white folks. I still am and forever will be unable to comprehend the hate that people have within them.
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