Today in class we discussed that Toni Morrison may have chosen the name Jackson Till as an allusion to Emmett Till, whose murder helped to launch the Civil Rights Movement.
Emmett Till was a fourteen year old boy who made the fatal mistake of supposedly whistling to a white woman in Mississippi. Two white men soon after kidnapped and brutally murdered Till. The gruesome coverage of Till's open casket funeral and the outrage over the acquittal of the two men seemed to ignite an uproar across the country against the horrible conditions African Americans faced in America at the time.
Here's a short video I found on youtube that goes into more detail.
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3 comments:
Till's story is very interesting thanks for sharing! It's interesting to see how just one quick, impulsive, moment of his life unfolded into such a bigger movement. Although his life ended at such a young age, at least he left behind a catalyst for a much greater movement.
I teared up when I saw that picture of Emmett after he had been beaten up. I'm an optimist, and I definitely see the world through rose colored glasses. I think exposure to events like this have such a profound effect on me because I'm idealistic; seeing that picture didn't shatter my perspective of the world, though. I'm anxious about one day experiencing a tragedy that makes me cynical and pessimistic.
That's a horrible story. Even if his death did help the civil rights movement as a whole, no one deserves to die like that. That video was really sad too, the pictures of that poor man were awful. Everyone knows that these sorts of things happened, but to actually see the pictures is really sad.
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