Emmett Till's Murder

Words: 550
Pages: 3

In John Edgar Wideman’s article, “Looking at Emmett Till” the reader is perceived with Emmett’s murder as a symbol of the uprising Civil Rights Movement. Emmett’s horrific murder is the living prove of the racism that occurred at that time in history and how it has no intentions to stop moving through time. Today, more than ever, African Americans are facing another battle for equality. It seems as if the phrase, “history eventually repeats itself” is been prove by the continuous breaking news of African Americans been murder by white police officers. Emmett Till’s murder was the spark in the Civil Rights Movement, and today African Americans such as: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Sandra Bland were the spark of the Black Lives Matter movement. …show more content…
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