The Past

by hilzoy

I was thinking, as I read some of the commentary about Rev. Wright, that at least some of the people I read didn't seem to realize just how recently African-Americans were literally terrorized on a regular basis; and in that context it occurred to me that I didn't know exactly how old Rev. Wright was. So I looked him up in Wikipedia, and found that he was born in 1941. And it struck me: that would make him the same age as Emmett Till:

"In August of 1955, one year and three months after Brown v. Board of Education, a fourteen-year-old black boy unschooled in the racial customs of the South traveled to Mississippi to visit relatives. With adolescent bravado, he whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. This inadvertent violation of a sacred code of the South cost him his life. Two white men dragged Till from his bed in the dead of night, beat him, and shot him through the head. Three days later his mangled body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. It was Emmett Till's first visit to the South. Eight days after arriving in Money, Mississippi, where the town line was marked with a sign reading, "Money -- a good place to raise a boy," Emmett Till was dead.

If not for one extraordinary decision of Mamie Till, Emmett's mother, the story may have ended there. At the urging of civil rights leaders, Mamie Till decided to leave the casket open at her son's funeral. She told the mortician not to "fix" her son's face. The world would see what had been done to him. Tens of thousands of people viewed Emmett Till's body, which was on display in a Chicago church for four long days. Gruesome photos of his maimed and distorted face flooded the national and international press. America was shocked out of comfortable complacency, and the Till case became international news. (...)

Till's uncle identified the assailants in court -- the first time a black person had testified against a white in Mississippi, and perhaps in the South. He was forced to leave town. After a five-day trial that made an open mockery of the possibility of justice, the defendants were acquitted. The Bryants celebrated, on camera, with a smile and an embrace."

That's a photo of Emmett Till while he was still alive. To see a photo of what remained of his face -- and photos like this were printed in Jet and circulated around the world -- click here. It's not pleasant to look at, but if you haven't seen it before, you should steel yourself and try.

American Experience did a show on Till's murder, and their website has reminiscences from people like Wright, who were about Till's own age, and black:

"I was a senior at Los Angeles High School in California. It had a profound affect on me because I understood that it could have happened to any of us. It shook my confidence. It was as though terrorists had struck -- but it was terrorists from our own country. It made me want to do everything I could to make sure this event would not happen ever again.

Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., high-profile trial lawyer

My memories are exact -- and parallel those of many others my age -- I felt vulnerable for the first time in my life -- Till was a year younger -- and recall believing that this could easily happen to me -- for no reason at all. I lived in Pennsylvania at the time.

Julian Bond, civil rights leader and chairman, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Emmett Till and I were about the same age. A week after he was murdered... I stood on the corner with a gang of boys, looking at pictures of him in the black newspapers and magazines. In one, he was laughing and happy. In the other, his head was swollen and bashed in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets and his mouth twisted and broken. His mother had done a bold thing. She refused to let him be buried until hundreds of thousands marched past his open casket in Chicago and looked down at his mutilated body. [I] felt a deep kinship to him when I learned he was born the same year and day I was. My father talked about it at night and dramatized the crime. I couldn't get Emmett out of my mind...

Muhammed Ali, boxer"

The murder of Emmett Till was not particularly unusual. Neither was the fact that the killers, though known to their community, were not brought to justice. (The jury deliberated for 67 minutes; one juror said that "they wouldn't have taken so long if they hadn't stopped to drink pop.") What made it unusual was the actions of Till's family: his mother's decision to have an open casket funeral, and his uncle's decision to testify against his killers in court.

Jeremiah Wright was fourteen when Till was killed. Though he did not live in the South, Jim Crow was in full force there until his early twenties. He was twenty one when George Wallace called for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He was a few days shy of twenty two when a bomb went off in a Birmingham church, killing four young girls who were at Sunday School, about a month shy of twenty three when Lyndon Johnson finally signed the Civil Rights Act, and almost twenty four when Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

By the time our country got around to guaranteeing voting rights for blacks, Jeremiah Wright had served his country in the Marine Corps for three years, and in the Navy for two more.

One more date, both because it is itself outrageous and because it is something to bear in mind if you should happen to wonder why someone like Rev. Wright might believe that our government caused HIV: when the Tuskegee Study ended in 1972, Rev. Wright was thirty one years old.

I imagine many of you know about the Tuskegee Study, but if you don't: it was a government study designed to see what happened to black men with syphilis when they were not treated. The men enlisted in the study were poor, and often illiterate, sharecroppers in Alabama. There were ethical problems with the study from the start, but the really appalling part came when penicillin became available in the mid-1940s (before then, there were no really good treatments for syphilis.) Once an effective treatment for syphilis became available, the moral thing to do would have been to halt the study and provide penicillin to everyone in it.

This wouldn't have been much of a loss to science: the study was badly designed, and pretty pointless once a treatment had appeared. There had also been a similar study on whites, carried out when no treatments were available, and there was no good reason to think blacks differed significantly from whites in this respect. More to the point, letting syphilis go untreated once a treatment was available is just plain wrong, and even if there had been more benefit to science than there was, that wouldn't have made it OK.

But our government didn't just not treat the men's syphilis. They actually prevented the men in the study from getting treatment on their own. Government researchers let these men sicken and die for twenty five years after an inexpensive and very effective treatment became available. They also let these men's wives become infected, and their children be born with congenital syphilis.

Results from this study were being published throughout this period. It was not a big secret. And, as I said, it was only ended, after public outcry, in 1972. That was forty years after it started, and twenty five years after penicillin became available -- twenty five years during which our government kept a group of its citizens from getting treatment for a fatal, horrific, and contagious disease so that it could watch them die.

Medical researchers often have a harder time winning the trust of African Americans than of most other groups of American citizens. None of the ones I've talked to doubts for a moment that the history of research on African Americans has a lot to do with this.

***

I'm not saying any of this to defend (or to attack) Rev. Wright. I said what I thought about his remarks here; if anyone wants to talk about what I attack and what I defend, that's the place to go.

I'm saying this because, as I said, a lot of this is more recent than some commenters I've read seem to imagine. For that reason, I thought that one of the many insightful parts of Obama's speech last Tuesday was this:

"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past"

I think that's exactly right. Rev. Wright's views seem to me accurate about America at a point in the past that is more recent than it seems. The problem is that they are static: times have changed, and it's not clear that Rev. Wright's views have always changed with them.

That makes it all the more ironic that some critics of Obama's speech (note: some, not all) suffer from exactly the same flaw: having decided a while back what liberals are like, they don't attend to the evidence of their senses and adjust their views accordingly; they fit us all into a preexisting template, however much they have to strain to do it. What leads someone to hear Obama's speech and say "today, he has embraced the politics of grievance," or "Blame whitey, and raise high the red flag of socialism," is not that dissimilar from the one that led Jeremiah Wright to say, in 2006, that "No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse."

***

Note: this 9-10 minute Youtube clip of part of the 9/11 sermon, including the bits that have been shown over and over, is worth listening to.

Comments

[russell]

the Jackson State killings occurred about half a week before the day I was born

Two young black men shot dead by police. Quite a number wounded, who were made to wait before being taken to the hospital so the police could pick up their shell casings.

Thanks -

[Gary Farber]

Grey seems to have pulled comments from here, and doesn't believe in links, I guess.

It's an interesting set of quotes to pull.

[Gary Farber]

"The South can't be such a horrible place for black people to live given the population is increasing."

Could you link to whomever you are debating, please?

I'd like to think I'm missing some comments, and you're not arguing solely with voices in your head.

I'd suggest quoting whomever it was here who asserted that the South is "such a horrible place for black people to live."

If I've simply not read closely enough, my apologies.

If not, wtf are you on about?

[Gary Farber]

"Do you find that as unbelievable?"

It might have been more useful if the link you gave wasn't a 500 error. Further references to it don't help, meanwhile.

[Gary Farber]

As russell noted, Jackson State is more or less the most infamous example of pale-skinned, um, overlooking and poor memory, given Kent State.

But it's only a fleeting tip of the berg.

I guess it helps to have a commie mother. She was working on civil rights, and anti-racism, in the Thirties.

(And also took a hitchhiking trip to Alabama, with a female friend, in 1942, to visit her enlisted-in-the-Army brother in training; she got asked if she could show her horns.)

I entirely remember being taken to civil rights, and Vietnam War, protests, since I was so little my father had to lift me up to see anything but people's knees. I'd never seen so many people before as my first large march in NYC (which I was largely carried to). 1966, both March, NYC, and May, D.C. (anti-War) was particularly memorable.

Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney, was a mantra I grew up with. Then Selma, and so on. Fred Hampton.

I have a lot of complaints about my parents, but lack of awareness of some of what's important isn't one of them.

(Apologies if this sounds self-congratulatory.)

[Jesurgislac]

Yet you asserted that there was no evidence for 17 deaths, when the director of the main Fallaja hospital confirmed 13 dead and 30 wounded operated on: you asserted that the demonstrators were armed and opened fire first, when the local witness say no, it was a peaceful demo until the Americans fired on them: you asserted that the demonstrators were shouting pro-Saddam slogans, for which I can find no evidence whatsoever except that you say a WaPo reporter asserted it: and you claim al-Jazeera is "not reliable". So your series of assertions is entirely based on the Iraqis all lying and the truth being only what the US soldiers who fired into the crowd said it was. That strikes me as being pure racism: I somehow doubt you would make the same assertion were US soldiers to have fired into an American demo, that every single oneof the non-Army witnesses is lying about how many were killed: how many wounded: whether the demonstrators fired first: and what the demonstration was about.

But I did not say that the soldiers were motivated by racism: I said that the US military's attitude towards Iraqi deaths was inspired by racism. (If I seemed to imply anything different, well, put it down to trying to explain institutional racism very briefly.) Individual soldiers, for the most part, do their best with the options open to them in the structure they're given. The individual soldiers who fired into an Iraqi crowd of demonstrators had not been given the proper structure to understand that this was one thing they must not do, and did not have sufficient training or experience to be able to stand fast and not fire - which British soldiers admit is the most difficult part of serving in NI.

[Slartibartfast]

Still wondering if Bill is going to defend his claim of "overwhelmingly law abiding" Washington, DC citizenry.

[Anarch]

trilobite: Anarch, I'm probably going to regret asking this, but why is Judenhass more understandable than American racism?

Just wanted to let you know that I've been busy and haven't been able to marshal my thoughts sufficiently to answer. [Though LJ's guess is a damn good one, as is Gary's.] I'll respond once I have the time to figure out what I'm trying to say :)

[bc]

Jes: I repeat: I have no absolute conviction that the Iraqis are lying.

It's amazing to me that you will put words in my mouth. Examples:

Yet you asserted that there was no evidence for 17 deaths, I never said that. I questioned your comments on 75 "seriously wounded" (which was not in the article you linked to or anywhere else).

you asserted that the demonstrators were armed and opened fire first, when the local witness say no, it was a peaceful demo until the Americans fired on them:

No, I said that there WAS evidence that the demonstrators were armed. Three witnesses. Remember? That is not the same as saying I asserted it. I said there was evidence. You said there was none.

you asserted that the demonstrators were shouting pro-Saddam slogans, for which I can find no evidence whatsoever except that you say a WaPo reporter asserted it

I did link. It didn't work. I'll try again. Look here

and you claim al-Jazeera is "not reliable".

Where did I say that? I said I was looking for corroboration and found references to Al Jazeera articles that did not mention many apparent facts: that the group had been disbursed twice before going to the school (mayor's office and a military command post); that they had been firing weapons into the air at the mayor's office and command post; that some witnesses DID say there were weapons and they were being fired, etc. I question ALL the accounts because they do not corroborate.

So your series of assertions is entirely based on the Iraqis all lying and the truth being only what the US soldiers who fired into the crowd said it was. That strikes me as being pure racism:

Again,I am not saying the Iraqis are all lying. In fact, three IRAQIS said there were guns. I gave an example how all could be telling the truth. There is also some evidence that there were rooftop gunmen that the soldiers may have mistakenly believed were one and the same with the protesters. This happened at night. Eye witness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Yet while I have left room for doubt, you take the word of the witnesses interviewed in your article as the gospel truth. Who's head is in the sand here?

Put aside the fact that Iraqis are not ethnically all the same (although I assume all of those involved in the protest were Sunni Arabs) and the U.S. Troops were presumably of mixed race. How is my questioning calling all Iraqis liars?

I am not disbelieving Iraqis for the sake of them being Iraqis. I am QUESTIONING. And both sides. But you initially asserted:

but there was no evidence that anyone in the demonstration had carried guns or had fired on the US soldiers.

I point out other evidence which leads you to say that the evidence is akin to U.S. investigations of "white" hate crimes. Really.

The death of the Iraqis was tragic no matter how it happened. My initial purpose was not to defend the incident, but to point out that it was not as clear as you take it.

Now back to the main post-The death of Emmett Till was disgusting, horrifying and something well worth remembering on any day.

[hf]

Still wondering if Bill is going to defend his claim of "overwhelmingly law abiding" Washington, DC citizenry.

Well now, the city probably has more crime that other places. Certainly the rates seem high compared to state numbers, which of course include varied communities. But the part you quote doesn't actually contradict that. It says the overwhelming majority of DC citizens don't break the law. And while that does seem technically false -- every adult American has broken some law -- the fact remains that the violent crime rate for the most recent year I found equals about 1.5% of the population. Presumably less than 1.5% of the people in DC commit more than their share of crimes.

[Bill]

“The reason incarceration “rates” are so low in Washington DC is because the Citizenry is overwhelmingly law abiding. Nothing to do with a system that is breaking down.”

That was sarcasm Slartibartfast. I saw my first dead guy in Washington DC, shot dead and sprawled on the concrete at a gas station. It left an impression.

The second sentence was meant to suggest a real reason for low conviction rates. The jury system has broken down.

[Jesurgislac]

bc: I did link. It didn't work. I'll try again. Look here

This link again does not make any reference to the slogans you claimed the demonstrators were shouting. This reporter says that "three other witnesses" - he does not say who they were, or even whether they were Iraqi or American! - asserted that "several of the protesters were shouting slogans in support of former president Saddam Hussein and firing assault rifles into the air" - but all of the Iraqi witnesses say: the demonstration was about the occupation of the elementary school (and about the US military occupation in general): the demonstration was "boisterous but peaceful": and the US soldiers were firing on unarmed Iraqis, including Iraqis who were attempting to rescue the wounded. Further, you know, you have not, it appears, been able to discover any news story which asserts the demonstrators were firing on the Americans. 17 Iraqi dead, according to a reliable witness: 75 Iraqi wounded: not one US soldier harmed.

You are questioning both the verifiable evidence which says the Iraqis were telling the truth, and the Iraqi witnesses. You are accepting as gospel the evidence of soldiers who need their version of events to be accepted as true. Again, bc: if soldiers had fired into a crowd in the US, killing 17 and wounding 75, if all the eyewitness evidence from the people who were not soldiers was that the crowd had not attacked the soldiers - but the soldiers were telling an unverifiable story that justified their firing into a crowd: would you so quickly assume that the soldiers must be telling the truth and all of the Americans must be lying?

If you think about it for about a minute, the "rooftop gunners" story doesn't work either. In April 2003, Falluja was a peaceful city. The mayor had surrendered to the US occupation without a fight: the Iraqis who lived there thought they could demonstrate on the streets without, as would have happened under Saddam Hussein, being killed for it. They were wrong.

Again: not one American soldier injured or killed. Despite what you see in the movies, when a bullet hits even an armored body, it causes an injury. None of the American soldiers were injured by gunfire. And again: the soldiers did not fire at these gunmen you imagine on the roofs. They were scared and confused and fired into the crowd. And in their fear and confusion, they killed 17 people, and they wounded 75. And your reaction is to argue that the Iraqis testifying to what happened - right down to the hospital director who was interviewed about the wounded and dead - must be lying.

[bc]

O.k., Jes, don't read the entire article. The link doesn't go to page 1 (for some reason that didn't work).

You're still missing my main point: even if it happened as you say, this in no way is relevant to Emmet Till. At worst, they did exactly what you say: they were scared and confused and fired into a crowd throwing rocks at them. Your reaction is to say that is the equivalent or at least motivated by the same thinking that led to the lynchings and beatings of black Americans. I don't buy it.

[Barbara]

Thank you for this. I will add: I represented one (of more than 15,000) African-American farmers in multiple Southern states who were systematically denied equal treatment by local agents of the United States Department in access to operating loans for their farms. They were only allowed to have funds after all the white farmers were taken care of, which caused them various kinds of financial hardship, including, getting their crops into the ground later and risking crop failure. The time period? 1980-1989. No, most white Americans have no idea.

[farmgirl]

In thinking about this thread yesterday, I realized I have a "past is present" incident to contribute:

I attended a liberal New England college. A young woman there was FORBIDDEN by her family to continue dating a young man she'd met at Christian Fellowship ... because he had Black ancestry. (Not that the alternative would be excusable, but this heritage wasn't obvious -- it made the basis for their racism seem abstract and somehow worse.) I remember how devastated they both were, and how shocked the rest of us were.

In 1995.

[Gary Farber]

Some statistics.

[...] In 1980-82, Dr. Singh said, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than people in the most deprived group (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7 years), and it continues to grow, he said.

[...]

“If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh said, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 years versus 81.3 years).” The difference between poor black men and affluent white women was more than 14 years (66.9 years vs. 81.1 years).

[...]

Under federal law, officials must publish an annual report tracking health disparities. In the fifth annual report, issued this month, the Bush administration said, “Over all, disparities in quality and access for minority groups and poor populations have not been reduced” since the first report, in 2003.

The rate of new AIDS cases is still 10 times as high among blacks as among whites, it said, and the proportion of black children hospitalized for asthma is almost four times the rate for white children.

And so on.

Also.

[Jesurgislac]

bc: Jes, don't read the entire article.

I did. Twice through. Evidently, you didn't read it as thoroughly as I did, since you're claiming you've found things in it that aren't there.

You're still missing my main point: even if it happened as you say, this in no way is relevant to Emmet Till.

You think it's not relevant to a discussion of American racism that the US military decided it didn't matter that US soldiers in a peaceful city killed 17 Iraqis and wounded 75? The US military regarded those 17 dead as indifferently as the jury in that Southern town regarded the death of Emmett Till: the soldiers who fired into the crowd were not arrested, questioned separately, charged, and court-martialled. The US military leisurely investigated itself and concluded that the 17 Iraqis killed had all deserved to die (and the wounded didn't matter), just as that Emmett Till had deserved to die.

[Megs]

I've only lurked in the past, but I must note that all of the self-congratulation here on the end of racism in this country, is wildly premature.
We cannot go many many places, still, in the north, south, east, and west. That is to vacation, work, live, or be ill.
As a mixed race black woman of 54 years, one of the hardest tasks I have, is to not despise whites for their petit racisms-- that happen daily. Perhaps I shouldn't try so hard, since you are all so forgiving of yourselves, already.

[Gary Farber]

"I've only lurked in the past, but I must note that all of the self-congratulation here on the end of racism in this country, is wildly premature."

You can't have lurked very much, nor read very much of this thread, obviously.

[hilzoy]

Megs: welcome.

[Jay Jerome]

megs: "I've only lurked in the past, but I must note that all of the self-congratulation here on the end of racism in this country, is wildly premature. We cannot go many many places, still, in the north, south, east, and west."

I sympathize with you, megs. But there's also places I can't go, right here in Los Angeles -- the Englewood area at night, for instance, and parts of South Central, and Compton-- and neither can my Japanese friends, or my Chinese friends, or many of my Hispanic friends.

On the other hand, I don't know any places here in L.A. that a white guy like me, or my Asian pals or Hispanic buddies can go, but Blacks can't -- unless you mean some snooty Beverly Hills restaurant, or exclusive gated community, but of course we get dirty looks from maitre-d's and security guards there too.

But don't let any of this deter you from continuing to despise whites for their petty racisms -- and I'll offer the same complaint for black racism too -- and that way we (you, me, and the reverend Wright) can perpetuate it through another couple of generations.

[Anonymous]

it is very disturbing to know what happened to that little boy. If he had of lived he probably would have done amazing things in this world today. But it was not in the right for those men to take the life of a little. Who were they to take an innocents life? time flies by so fast and when you see things like that of how bad they beat him it makes you want to think that there is no justice in the world. Only 2 know that someone was killed for saying something to a lady

[Anonymous]

it is very disturbing to know what happened to that little boy. If he had of lived he probably would have done amazing things in this world today. But it was not in the right for those men to take the life of a little. Who were they to take an innocents life? time flies by so fast and when you see things like that of how bad they beat him it makes you want to think that there is no justice in the world. Only 2 know that someone was killed for saying something to a lady

[dorinell alcantara]

ohhh mmyyyy ggaahhh!!!
who would dooo osuch a hooorrriiiibblllee thing to such a child?