Word: tilles
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There is little doubt that the "emotionalism" of the NAACP has aggravated the guilty pride of the Southerner, and in publicizing the Till case the NAACP set out to provoke aggravation. For, as Mr. Halberstam says, "there is a double standard of justice in Mississippi, one for Negroes, the other for whites. On the assumption that the evidence clearly pointed to Milam and Bryant as the kidnappers and murderers of Emmett Till, the group sought to focus national and world attention on the small Southern courtroom. The state attorney general had brought the defendants to trial, but this conscientious action...
This is to be regretted, because the significance of the Till case could not have been much clearer to Mr. Halberstam if he had been familiar with the Scottsboro case of the 1930's, when nine men were railroaded to death and to jail, and almost nothing of the furor of the Till case was heard...
...above is granted as being a true representation of the picture, I still cannot see where Mr. Halberstam has contributed much to the clarification of the larger issue which is contingent upon the particulars of the Emmett Till case. It is this part of Mr. Halberstam's argument that I wish to fill in, since without this, his article seems pointless and vacuous...
...fundamental reason for such a thing as the Emmett Till episode ... rests upon the archaic ideology of the southern people as a majority. I interpret ideology here in the Webster sense as the "aggregate of ideas, beliefs, doctrines of a large group of persons". This ideology has lead the Southerners to spew forth such statements as the following: "If Roy and J. W. (referring to Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, the defendants in the Till case) are convicted of murder...where under the shining sun is the land of the free and the home of the brave?" Or more...
...conclusion, I put forth the proposition that Mr. Halberstam has missed the point in his analysis of the Till case. His manner of thinking has restricted him to the immediate consequences, and he has not envisaged these consequences as being important only so far as they affect the entity of social thought...