Have Supporters of Emmett Till Moved the Goalposts?

 

Emmett till's decomposed corpse 

Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Bradley 
 

By Nicholas Stix

One of my longtime readers, Chicago Guy, responded to "Another Emmett Till? Hate Crime in Miami-Dade School? Unarmed 6’1,” 200+ lb. Black “Student,” 18, Confesses to Choking His Teacher Unconscious, Raping Her, and Stealing Her Car; He Used Condom During Rape, but Left It in Vic’s Purse; Father is also Convicted Rapist."
 

Chicago guy said...

Might be some sort of genetic inheritance from father to son that's not clearly understood. Somewhat similar to Emmett Till's proclivity for sexual harassment and his father's conviction for rape and murder.

Wednesday, September 24, 2014 at 11:37:00 A.M. EDT
 

My response follows:

Maybe so. I mentioned Till, because Carolyn Bryant claimed in her trial testimony that when they were alone in her store, he initially grabbed her hand and then put his hands around her waist, repeatedly demanded a “date” (sex) and claimed to have already “been with” white women. His cousin, Simeon Wright, then came into the store and dragged him out.

If Mrs. Bryant was telling the truth, it sounds like Till was fitting to rape her, before Wright came in and dragged him out. It wasn't just in the Jim Crow South that the notion of a boy grabbing the hand, putting his hands around the waist of a married stranger, and talking the way she said Till spoke to her, was an abomination, and a prelude to worse. And it still is!

According to the Till forces, we should disregard everything Mrs. Bryant said in defense of her husband. While it is possible she lied on his behalf, look at who is telling us she was a liar—a bunch of liars!
 

Till-murderer Roy Bryant and his wife, Carolyn 
 

The pro-Till story was originally that he was murdered for merely wolf-whistling at Mrs. Bryant on the street. But since Till had been in the store alone with Mrs. Bryant, there is no reason to believe this story. The pro-Till forces are asserting knowledge they can’t possibly have. So, that’s a lie.

The Pretend Encyclopedia now promotes two mutually incompatible narratives:

Simeon Wright, who dragged Till out of the store, asserted that Till had not done any of the things Mrs. Bryant alleged, but:

1. Since Wright hadn’t been in the store at the time, he had no way of knowing what Till was up to before he opened the door;
2. Wright had every bit as much of a motive to lie on Till’s behalf as Mrs. Bryant had to lie on behalf of her husband;
3. If Till was acting so innocently, why did Wright drag him out of the store?; and
4. An unnamed additional party, who claims to have been in the store at the same time as Till, Mrs. Bryant, her sister-in-law, the children the latter was looking after, and Simeon Wright, disputes Mrs. Bryant’s story.

The Pretend Encyclopedia acts as though story (4) strengthened the Till forces’ narrative, but if Carolyn Bryant was never alone in the store with Till, the official story collapses.
 

Till-murderer J.W. Milam and wife, Juanita 

In recent years, the pro-Till forces have revised their story. Now, Till was not even guilty of wolf-whistling, but rather had a speech impediment that caused him to sometimes sound as if he were whistling. Apparently, the Till forces expect us to believe that Carolyn Bryant ran out behind Till to retrieve her pistol, based not on his having grabbed her hand, groped her, and demanded sex.

Thus, they have worked to make Till ever more innocent. I think they have overplayed their hand. They appear to have used the same strategy that they always use when they seek to turn a dead black teenager or young man into a “civil rights martyr,” by airbrushing all blemishes out of the picture, and depicting the victim (who nowadays, typically is no victim at all, but rather a perpetrator), as an angel.

I first heard of the murder of Emmett Till during the early 1980s, through William Styron’s novel, Sophie’s Choice, which I read in West Germany.

Sophie’s Choice was a crappy, overlong novel (over 500 pages!) that I forced myself to finish, just so I could condemn it. My beef was that Styron was constantly guilty of “tell” instead of “show.”

A competent story teller is supposed to evoke in the reader what the characters are feeling. Instead, Styron would constantly tell us that Sophie “felt like crying.”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that Styron was a leftwing, political hack. He wove the Holocaust and the Emmett Till murder into the story, in order to tap into a reservoir of political sympathy, and thereby get a pass on his bad writing, and reap a book contract, movie deal, and awards galore.

The Holocaust angle was what made the book so famous: A Nazi officer at a concentration camp forces the newly arrived Sophie to choose between letting her son or daughter survive. She chooses the son. That was “Sophie’s choice.”

There was no realistic basis for the novel’s conceit. Sophie was a Catholic, and if she had been a Jew, the Nazis would have taken both of her children, and sent them immediately to their deaths.

Apparently, this was early in the movement to re-write the Holocaust as having victimized all sorts of gentiles, including homosexuals and Gypsies, as badly as the Jews, in order to enliven an exhausted genre, and squeeze yet more sympathy out of the public.

On top of that, Styron was an old hand at playing the race card, though it sometimes blew up in his face, due to black supremacists’ rage at a white man writing about topics like the mass murder perpetrated by slave revolt leader, Nat Turner, in The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Styron presents Till’s murderers, half-brothers Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, as having chopped off the boy’s genitals, and having stuffed them in his mouth.

That was a whopper. Bryant and Milam beat the bejeesus out of Till, gouged out one of his eyes, and shot him to death, but they didn’t castrate him, or stuff his sexual organs in his mouth. Apparently, that was the sort of thing that the Indians were found of doing to white men.
 

Mose Wright pointing at J.W. Milam, during the murder trial 

If Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were the racist monsters we have always been told they were, what need was there to lie about them?

When you go half your life having believed something about a historical incident, only to find out in middle-age that you had been lied to, you start doubting everything you are told about the incident in question, especially when you see that the same partisans who promoted the initial lie seem to be conjuring up new ones.

Here’s my current impression of the Emmett Till case.

Emmett Till was bad news. He was his father’s son and, like his father, a convicted and executed murderer and serial rapist, was obsessed with white women, and would eventually have raped at least one white woman, and maybe killed her. He would have ended up in prison or, like his father, executed. However, he didn’t rape Carolyn Bryant, though probably not for lack of trying. Thus, while he earned himself being beaten within an inch of his life, he did not deserve to die for molesting Mrs. Bryant.

Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were guilty of murdering Till, and did indeed confess to said murder to Look magazine writer William Bradford Huie in 1956, after their acquittal for Till’s murder. However, I believe that due to the extenuating circumstances of Till’s likely molestation of Mrs. Bryant, Bryant and Milam should have gotten life in prison, rather than the death penalty.