Make no mistake about it. The 1954 murder of Emmet Till was a horrific tragedy. His death has become an iconic event of American racism – and a horrific tragedy for a mother, family, and friends who loved him. Till’s death has recently been memorialized in a movie – which is getting a lot of attention in the national media.
However, there is a much larger historic story to be told as part of our education on the history of racism in America. What has been missing is the “who” was responsible for Till’s death. I do not mean just the people who committed the brutal murder.
Till was killed by more than a few men. He was killed by a political and social culture that brutally oppressed black Americans. And that political and social culture has a name — and it is the Democratic Party. Such injustices can only take place when there is one authoritarian ruling class.
Furthermore, Till’s murder was only one event out of thousands upon thousands of equally heinous murders of innocent black men, women, and children – all committed by or under the sponsorship of … the Democratic Party
In focusing only on the Till murder, we tend to disregard the depths of depravity of the racist Democratic Party that exclusively ruled over the former southern Confederate States for more than 100 years AFTER the Civil War … AFTER the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments … AFTER civil rights legislation …. AFTER court decisions. Democrat institutional racism is not ancient history.
Allow me to share a couple of stories from my upcoming book on race in America. These are only two of the hundreds of thousands – perhaps even millions – of black citizens who suffered brutalities and death at the hands of Democrat regimes in southern states. – and who are the forgotten stories in black history. From 1812 to 1968 there were more than 4,000 lynchings in Democrat-controlled Dixie – and is believed to be only a fraction of the real number. Here are a couple of others.
Thomas Moss
Southern justice struck close to home when Tom Moss, a prominent black businessman as well as a postman and friend of Wells’ husband, was lynched in Memphis, Tennessee along with two friends for fighting back against a group of whites who came to vandalize his store.
On March 9th, a white mob dragged Moss and his two friends from the Shelby County jail and brought them to the Chesapeake & Ohio railroad yard. There is an incredibly detailed description of the lynching because the leaders of the white mob had invited the press to cover the event as a means of intimidating others.
Moss’s struggled to get away. In retaliation, members of the mob shot off his fingers and hand “inch by inch.” They shot him in the face so that “the ball (of his eye) hung over his cheek in shreds.” They blew off his jaw and where his right eye had once existed, his brains flowed out. The Appeal-Avalanche, covering the event reported that his injuries were deserved in view of his “vicious and unyielding nature.”
In addition to being lynched, Moss was also shot. The newspaper reported his dying words as “Tell my people to go west, there is no justice for them here.”
Claude Neal
From a research publication
“Local newspapers and a radio station, announcing that a ‘Negro’ would be ‘mutilated and set afire,’ provided details concerning the place and time of the anticipated event. That afternoon, quite unexpectedly, news of the scheduled lynching was picked up and distributed nationally by the Associated Press. The response of the NAACP and many other concerned people to this news moved Florida governor David Sholtz to offer the Jackson County sheriff the assistance of the state’s national guard. The offer was refused. The mob forced Neal to eat his penis, stabbed him with a knife repeatedly in his sides and stomach, and cut off several of his fingers and toes. After suffering such torture for almost two hours, Neal died before the hundreds of people who had gathered in a carnival-like atmosphere could see him lynched. Disappointed and enraged, the crowd—including many families—resumed the mutilation of the body before burning and hanging it from a nearby tree.”
It is no coincidence that the hideous tradition of lynching ebbed and virtually disappeared as the American southland transitioned to more bipartisan governance. It is no small irony that Democrats supported recent anti-lynching federal legislation a half-century after lynching was no longer a reality – and 85 years after President Roosevelt and Democrats successfully opposed repeated attempts by congressional Republicans to pass anti-lynching legislation at a time lynchings were at their peak.
We hear a lot today about suppressing black history – and there is some justification for that concern. However, as our schools and society look more appropriately into that history, there is still a peculiar censorship. We learn more about the atrocities, but without naming the institution that was exclusively responsible … the Democratic Party.
A couple of years ago, my family and I saw “Selma” – the movie about Martin Luther King’s march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It was an excellent movie. It included names like George Wallace and Sheriff “Bull” Connor – and spoke of evil “white people” — but never mentioned their base of power … the institution that drove their murderous culture … the Democratic Party.
I get a lot of blowback from left-wingers who think it is not very nice to call out the Democratic Party for their past. On the other hand, it is okay to cancel the Founders for their ownership of slaves. The only difference I see is that the Founders did incredibly noble work in creating the world’s best democratic Republic despite the existence of slavery – something worth remembering and celebrating There was no other side of the story about southern Democrats and their reign of terror over millions of black Americans in the land of Dixie. They were purely evil.
The point of this commentary is to understand that as terrible as the killing of Emmet Till, it is important to remember the horrendous BIG PICTURE of those times – and who was responsible on the grand scale. And perhaps more importantly how those events of history play out in today’s major cities.
So, there ‘tis.