Emmett Till Thesis

During the post-WWII period, blacks fight for desegregation resulted in violence, murder, economic warfare and obstruction by local and state governments. The repression, violence and murders were a significant setback among Negroes in the postwar years. For example, the death of Emmett Till was not just another statistic in the tragic history of American lynchings (Feldstein, page 290). However, it was a defensive act on the half of white southerners to the decision in the Brown v. Board of Education. The murder of the fourteen-year-old African American Emmett Till was a gruesome act. Rob Bryant, twenty-four years old, and his half-brother J.W. Milam, thirty-six, kidnapped Emmett Till, a Chicago native, at gunpoint from his relatives’ cabin

in Mississippi (Feldstein, page 263). As an illustration, the death of Emmett Till was so ghastly due to the way in which his body was found. “He had been brutally beaten, one eye was gouged out, and he was shot in the skull” (Feldstein, Page 263).

The irritating part about this death was that the killers were free men, yet if this is was white boy found dead the person responsible for his death would have been put in jail for life. Another case in which whites took their defense to a new level was shown in the reading Birmingham’s Untouchables. Police repressions became a major issue for African Americans. In Chapter 4, Kelley states that a wave of police brutality and beatings re-ignited resistance to police brutality and in most cases it was just a young black man arguing with a white person (Kelley, Page 84). One example in particular, Henderson, who was arrested and jailed for merely arguing with a white man, was found the next morning in his jail cell handcuffed and fatally shot (Kelley, Page 85). Not only were the actions by whites in Birmingham resulted in deaths, but they also obstructed other parts of black lives. For instance, Birmingham had only one residential area in the city zoned for blacks; most black dwellings were located in area zones for industrial and commercial use. The idea that racist whites goal conspired to limit black housing opportunities (Kelley, Page

81). Another incident that involved terror towards blacks was an example in Chapter 2, Testing the Limits by Charles Payne. It was an act of fear brought onto blacks, “Six carloads of white men with shotguns told Charles Diggs of Michigan that if he didn’t leave town a lot of people were going to be hurt. He left, selling his farm for half its value to one of the whites who threatened him” (Payne, Page 36). This example shows that although there were many murders and acts of violence towards blacks, many threats by whites scared off blacks as well.