Emmett Till – Trayvon Martin
Throughout every one of the cases in which we had been assigned to review and analyze, I found many of the issues at hand had been similar in many ways. For instance, two of the most similar cases happened to be the case of Emmett Till as well as Trayvon Martin. In both cases, the victims of these crimes were both innocently young, defenseless, African American males who had been judged by their perpetrators based on their appearances. Their assailants, being George Zimmerman (Trayvon Martin) and both J.W Miliam and Roy Bryant (Emmet Till) each adult males who had been armed with weapons had wrongfully profiled their victims based on their looks, most importantly the color off their skin.
In the case of Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, a community volunteer watchmen came across the young teen as he had been walking home from the nearby store. Zimmerman, anxious, reached out to police and described the young teen as “a real suspicious guy” and proceeded to tell the police that the teen “looks like he is up to no good”. Rather than following the procedure that the dispatcher had advised him to do, he took matters into his own hands, resulting in the death of young Trayvon Martin.
According to the William Bradford Huie “tell all” of the Emmett Till case “The shocking story of approved killing in Mississippi”, we learned numerous of times, the conflict between the size and age of the young teen as Huie describes to us that Till appeared to be “stocky”, “muscular”, “approximately 160 lbs” and seemed to be “5’4″ or 5″”. By reading this in the article, it is understood that the appearance of the teen had been uncertain by not just Huie, but also by his assailants. In the title of the case itself, we are made aware of the confusion regarding Till’s appearance in age when they refer to him as both a “child” and “boy” at the same time. J.W Milam and Roy Bryant took it upon themselves to punish the young teen for his action which lead to his brutal murder.
In the article, Milam makes a statement which gives us a full understanding of why he decided to take action in the manner in which he did. He stated that “Im no bully- I never hurt a n***** in my life. I like n*****s in their place…” he then went on to say “as long as I live and can do anything about it n*****s are gonna stay in their place”. This left no question in the readers mind why the end result was the brutal death of this young man.
Both of these unfortunate events bring to light the fact that race, fear and hate has spanned throughout time and in a world that thinks it is so far advanced and more open-minded than our predecessors. Incidences like these, prove the opposite.