Fraudulent, Tenured “Historian”: Emmett Till’s Father, Louis, was a Victim of the Jim Crow Military

Re-posted and Fisked by Nicholas Stix

The reader is hereby warned: What you are about to read, posing as history, is anti-white propaganda of pornographic proportions, in which racist, scholarly fraud Alice Kaplan never lets up with her hyperbole and outright lies.
 

A hidden memorial to the worst aspects of our Jim Crow Army
By Alice Kaplan, professor of literature and history at Duke University and is the author of "The Interpreter"
September 25, 2005
Chicago Tribune

Emmett Till's tragedy is so deeply engraved in our national consciousness that there is scarcely an American alive today who can't evoke it in all its details: the boy's face so mutilated by the crime that only his father's signet ring with its initials "L.T." identified him; his open coffin, immortalized in a photograph that still bears witness to the horrors of racism in the American South.

[“[T]here is scarcely an American alive today who can't evoke it in all its details…” That’s simply a ludicrous statement. The boy’s face was disfigured by a combination of the beating he took, decomposition from days in a river, and being partially eaten by fish.

The murder of Emmett Till is not “deeply engraved in our national consciousness,” but not for lack of effort by propagandists posing as historians like Alice Kaplan. Kaplan wrote this op-ed 50 years after Till’s murder. Blacks lynch whites every day in this country, and yet leftwing hacks like Alice Kaplan still constantly rant about Emmett Till 50, and now 60 years later. The reason is that white lynchings of blacks were already then so rare. The same ranters must promote every race hoax to come down the pike, and suppress knowledge of black racism, including the aforementioned black lynchings of whites.

The reason why Till’s photograph is such a big deal is that his mother, Mamie, insisted on his coffin being open for the public to see. If white parents of blacks’ lynching victims did the same, there’d be thousands of horrific photographs of white lynching victims.

In May 2013, I attended the retrial of racist, black, Knoxville Horror murderer George Thomas in Knoxville, Tennessee. I got to see some of the coroner’s photographs of white lynching victims Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, who suffered magnitudes more than Emmett Till did. Christopher Newsom was anally raped, and burned like a piece of meat (post-mortem, fortunately). For parts of two days, Channon Christian was vaginally, orally, and anally raped, beaten, and tortured so that only the soles of her feet were free of bruises.

Fortunately, George Thomas was convicted of murder, but no justice will be meted out to him. He will eventually be paroled, rather than being executed.]

But very few people know about the tragedy of Emmett Till's father, Louis Till. Louis Till's story, more complicated, reveals how segregation worked nationally, in institutions like the U.S. Army. Together, the fate of father and son encapsulate a legacy of American racism that stretches across this country.

[There was no tragedy of Louis Till, and there was nothing complicated about his case.]

Emmett was nearing his 4th birthday when Louis Till was hanged by the U.S. Army in Italy for rape and murder. Louis Till spent the last month of his life in a disciplinary center with hundreds of African-American soldiers and very few white detainees. One of the only white prisoners was the poet Ezra Pound, confined to a 6-by-6-foot cage as he awaited a treason trial for his fascist radio broadcasts. Pound referred to Till in the epic poem he was writing as "St. Louis Till."

[Kaplan makes the remark, “with hundreds of African-American soldiers and very few white detainees,” without explanation, as if it should shock us. Why should it shock us? During and after the war, black soldiers went wild, raping and murdering French and Italians. The rampages were a black mark on the American Army. And yet, Alice Kaplan and her fellow, righteously indignant propagandists have undertaken a campaign to turn history and morality on their heads, and condemn the American Army for meting out justice to black rapist-murderers.]

Only a man as disturbed as Pound could have made Till into a literary saint.

[But he did no such thing. I can no find no passage in my copy of Pound’s The Cantos, in which Pound wrote, "St. Louis Till." If Pound did somewhere, it might have been meant sardonically or with no sense at all. The only passage I know of where Pound mentions Till is incoherent:

“Pisa, in the 23rd year of the in sight of the tower/
“And Till was hung yesterday/
“for murder and rape with trimmings   plus Cholkis/
“plus mythology, thought he was Zeus ram or another one”/]

Before the war, Till nearly strangled his wife, who took out a court order to keep him away. A judge gave Till a choice between jail and the Army: He chose the Army. He was a private in a port battalion, a member of the racially segregated Army that restricted the majority of its black soldiers to service units where they worked as menial laborers, moving the supplies that guaranteed military victory in Europe.

[“Menial labor” is a common cliché of the racist Left. Usually leftists use it to describe the sort of work most blacks were consigned to under segregation. Never mind that during the same period, over 80 percent of whites were consigned to “menial labor,” e.g., factory and farm labor. Never mind that very few members of a group with an average IQ of 85 are good for anything but menial labor. And finally, she lies, in describing “moving the supplies that guaranteed military victory in Europe” as “menial labor.” That was the Red Ball Express! How could that be menial? Should blacks have been commanding soldiers? Then we would have lost the war!]

Segregation makes no distinction but racial ones: Till entered the Army as a known criminal, according to a cynical policy that forced law-abiding black citizens into the same units with men as ill-equipped for military service as Till was.

[Kaplan is lying on two different levels here. First, since at least the 1990s, many blacks (e.g., columnist William Raspberry), and not just radicals, have called for black felons to be saved from prison, and left in the community, asserting that it somehow harmed the community, to be bereft of its criminals. Thus, the idea that blacks are deeply offended by having to deal with criminals is garbage. Second, she lies about the policy she calls “cynical.” The policy of permitting criminals to avoid jail by instead serving in the military applied equally to whites and blacks alike, went on for generations, and necessarily involved both the military and the criminal justice system.

When I was a kid during the early 1970s, I had numerous friends who skirted jail that way, variously joining the U.S. Marine Corps and the Navy. In 1990, as a foster care caseworker, I had an idiot, 18-year-old black boy who participated in a robbery with some friends. (He was an idiot, because he denied that he was guilty of a crime, because he didn’t use a weapon or put his hands on the victim.) I don’t remember if it was a recruiter or a court employee, but a guy I spoke with said I was dating myself, in asking for the service out, because the policy had been ended years before.]

Official Army policy was "separate but equal" but there was nothing equal for blacks in the brutal conditions of their training, in not being allowed into combat, in segregated barracks--even for officers--and in the undignified manner in which they were forced to live as they endangered their lives to liberate Europe from Nazism.

[I’m not aware of any “brutal conditions of their training,” or “undignified manner in which they were forced to live,” and neither is Alice Kaplan. She’s just lying again. We’re talking about a goddamned war, for cryin’ out loud! If anything, black soldiers lived in a much more “dignified manner” than white soldiers, who were much more likely to get maimed or killed.]

It was obvious to black GIs that even German prisoners of war received better treatment than they did. [What?!] This was a case of Jim Crow law writ nationwide, and, in the course of World War II, it meant that American-style apartheid was exported to Europe, North Africa and the Pacific, for all the world to see.

[She gives no examples, because she can’t. Alice Kaplan is a self-caricature of a phony “historian.”]

I found Louis Till's grave in France, in a small plot of land outside the official grounds of the Oise-Aisne World War I American cemetery. [No doubt, she got some sort of prestigious grant to do that.] In what is known as "Plot E" there are 96 markers, marble squares with numbers and no names. Eighty of these graves belong to African-American soldiers, all of them tried and convicted in U.S. Army courts-martial of crimes of rape and murder. That means that 83 percent of the men executed in Europe, North Africa and the Mediterranean
Theaters of Operation were African-Americans, in an Army that was only 8.5 percent black. The procedures in their trials were faulty enough to have led to a total reform of military justice after WWII, to a uniform code and the establishment of a court of military appeals.

[More garbage.]

Perhaps the Army felt it was protecting the honor of the other war dead by consolidating its convicted criminals in Plot E. [She just pulled a switch. Before, she was upset that law-abiding blacks had to serve with black criminals. Now, she mocks the idea of separating the graves of men who died serving their country honorably from those of executed murderers, who hadn’t served their country at all. She has no intellectual integrity at all.] Army officials may have believed they were sparing the families of those criminals by informing them only that their loved ones had died "due to willful misconduct." Mamie Till asked a lawyer friend to find out more, and after many requests, he was finally given permission to consult Louis Till's court-martial transcript. The Army sent Mamie Till her husband's engraved silver signet ring, which she gave to her son. Most families never knew how or why their loved ones died and don't know where they are to this day.

Plot E, closed to the public, nonetheless exists. While privacy may have been protected at Plot E, history has been lost. As a nation, we live with the consequences of repressing our bad memories. [And are frauds like Kaplan helping, by giving us fake “memories”?] An Army where black soldiers were classified by race, badly trained [says who?], poorly led [huh?] and treated as less than human [again, says who?] encouraged violence among those soldiers. [Oh, my God! Do you see what she just did? She just snuck in a rationalization for Louis Till’s rapes and murder, as well as other executed black soldiers’ rapes and murders: The white devil made them do it!] We recently remembered the 50th anniversary of Emmett Till's murder and unjust trial. We also need to remember Louis Till's trial, not because he was innocent, but because we as a nation were guilty. [Guilty of what?! Alice Kaplan is guilty of scholarly fraud, but she has no conscience. Instead, she condemns white Americans, who weren’t guilty of anything.]