The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till
1996; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 9; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/yale.1996.0016
ISSN1080-6636
Autores Tópico(s)American Political and Social Dynamics
ResumoThe High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till Jacqueline Goldsby (bio) Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago . . . .I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to Negroes in the South, I said: ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ . . . Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all. —Mamie Till Bradley, mother of Emmett Till, at a NAACP rally in Cleveland, Ohio, September 18, 1955 [F]rom my standpoint as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in [any] way deem to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree. —Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, October 11, 1991 . . . [N]o one wishes to be plunged down, head down into the torrent of what he does not remember and does not wish to remember. —James Baldwin, on his reaction to the Atlanta Child Murders of 1979, from The Evidence of Things Not Seen, 1985 Framing the Terms of Debate In the third week of August 1955, Mamie Bradley boarded her son, Emmett Louis Till, on an Illinois Central train departing from Chicago for Money, Mississippi. When he returned during the first week of September, Bradley’s son arrived lying in a plain pine coffin. He had been murdered. The fourteen year-old boy committed a man’s mistake by flirting with a white woman in a community where racial caste lines held fast to an agrarian culture and economy that more resembled the Redemptive 1890s than the Pax Americana 1950s. Mamie Bradley’s dream state—her transplanted identity as a “Northern Negro” safe from segregated harm—was shattered by the sight of her son’s battered body in a box. Her good fortune, she reflects, was a precarious presumption that depended upon—and, so, defended—the “Southern Negro’s” [End Page 245] vulnerability to physical violence and political and economic disfranchisement. Her son’s murder returned Bradley home, to a history she thought she had left behind when she left Mississippi years before. The transformation of Mamie Bradley’s consciousness became “the business” of the Civil Rights Movement Clarence Thomas denounced throughout his political career until the moment when his “good job”—a seat on the United States Supreme Court—was unexpectedly jeopardized by Anita Hill’s accusations against him. Then, the conversion Thomas’s liberal supporters hoped for occurred: his sense of black history expanded and he acknowledged his connection to it. At his final appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee Thomas shifted his “standpoint.” No longer the Jeffersonian Everyman—the sharecropper son who rose to political prominence through sheer grit and personal initiative—Thomas re-formed into a “black American”: specifically, Every Southern Black Male victimized by the forces of a white patriarchy determined to maintain “an old order.” To allow Anita Hill’s testimony to be heard, Thomas argued, was to sacrifice him for a crime he did not commit. To allow Anita Hill’s testimony to be heard, Thomas insisted, was to mock the protocols of judicial procedure. To allow Anita Hill’s testimony to be heard, Thomas accused, was to “destroy” him. To “caricature” him. To “lynch” him. And history would not repeat itself in his instance; Thomas would refuse—as thousands of black men before him had, in vain, tried to do—to yield the truth in terms of his body. To rebut Anita Hill’s testimony Thomas convened as his witness the image that compresses the horrific brutality of America’s racial history with regard to African-Americans into a singular act: lynching. However, by characterizing his as a “high-tech” affair, Thomas suggests that he understands the difference between forms of victimization. In a “high-tech...
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