Highest of all because it reminds us that a racial period we wished was concluded is not. In the Zimmerman case we have an unnerving historical linkage to the infamous trial of the two men who in massacred 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, a Chicago teen visiting his family in Mississippi. The connection between the cases is far deeper one than the comparisons imply. At issue is not just the South and its past but who lures the boundaries that split us as a society.
In Trayvon Martin’s incident the outward limitations he traversed were geographic. On his way home with a soft drink and candy, he passed across a townhouse complex where he was an unfamiliar individual to George Zimmerman, who had a record of constantly calling the police in Sanford, Florida, to report those he saw as dangers.
In Emmett Till’s case the outward boundaries he traversed were verbal. Till and his cousin, were in rural Mississippi visiting family when they ran into difficulty. On a challenge from one of the teenagers he was talking with outside Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, Till was pushed into talking back to the white woman inside the store. “Bye, Baby,” he supposedly said to Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant’s wife, the store vendor after purchasing candy from