Discrimination In American History

Once Bryant and Milam had finally got ahold of Till, they took him to Milam’s barn, where they then murdered the fourteen-year-old boy. The two men then threw Till’s body into the Tallahatchie River with barbed wire and a fan tied to his neck. Three days later, a boy fishing had seen feet sticking out of the water. The body was then pulled out from the river, bloated and beaten. After a day of Till’s disappearance, Bryant and Milam had been arrested for the abduction of the boy.

A work of Maya Angelou was deeply influenced by her early life due to what happened at this time of her life. When she was seven she went to Chicago, Illinois to visit her mother since she lived with her brother at her paternal grandmother’s house. While visiting her mother in this time, her mother’s boyfriend raped her. Too afraid to tell anyone, Maya Angelou told her brother and in result her brother told their uncles. Their uncles killed her mother’s boyfriend out of rage, and this made Maya Angelou mute for five years until she met someone very important; Mrs. Flowers.

*Dill’s personal thoughts throughout his conversation as he returned to Mississippi shocked post trial* * Gosh darn it. I ain’t gettin’ over the trial.....

This past week I flew to Texas with my Mom so we could attend my Grammy’s funeral. It was a very difficult week but once I got down there my friend from kindergarten picked me up so I could get out of the house for a while. Even though I told him I was doing okay, he knew that I was really struggling. I was in such a better mood after spending some time with him that I couldn’t stop thanking him for understanding what I needed. Even though it was hard for me to know that my Grammy had passed away, someone told me that I needed to be excited for her.

“Democracy Abroad, Lynching at Home : Racial Violence in Florida” by Tameka Bradley Hobbs discusses the great lengths of horror that took place in the state of Florida. From the beginning Hobbs starts with the emotional story of Bernice Golden who discovered the body of her son hung in her mother's yard and was not convinced that her son had committed suicide as the law enforcement had suggested. This scene brought back memories of situations in the past in which a black man was hung by his white counterpart. These acts of lynching were common throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with almost 5,000 African Americans losing their lives in these acts of racial terrorism. Hobbs states that while some methods of upholding the idea of white supremacy were on a downward trend the legal aspects or “legal lynchings” were increasing.

While she gave speeches she would talk a lot about forgiveness and forgiving others for things that they have done. After one of her speeches, a guard from the concentration camp in Germany came up to her and asked for forgiveness for what he has done to her and her sister. She forgave him because she believes that you should forgive anyone. “Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.” (crosswalk.com) She also made a home for victims that went through the concentration camps.

Emmett Till was a 14 year old African American boy who was murdered while visiting relatives in money, Mississippi. In money, mississippi, he went into a store and was said to have whistled at a the store clerk (1). In source one, it said that he liked to play pranks and he was dared to ask the white cashier ,Carolyn Bryant, for a date. A few days later, Carolyn 's husband and brother in law went to Emmett’s uncle’s house, wear he was staying (1). In the middle of the night he was forced to carry a cotton gin fan to the Tallahatchie river, then he was beaten, got his eye gouged out, shot in the head, and thrown in the river, tied to the cotton gin fan.

Emmett was left mutilated and horrendous looking for all of the world to see when his mother decided to have an open-coffin funeral. News of Emmett’s story spread through the nation like a forest fire, outraging and devastating people all over, saying how brutal the murder was, or how it wasn’t brutal enough. Emmett’s trial took place less than 2 weeks after he’d been killed, and somehow his trial was more unfair than his death. During trial, Mr. Breland harassed Till’s Uncle Mose, “And yet you could see clearly, clearly enough to accuse to white men of murder, to claim that the men on your porch were Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam over there… No problem with white folks, yet there you sit accusing two of our upstanding white citizens of barging into your home in the middle of the night, pointing a gun and a flashlight in your face, and hauling off your nephew”(170/171). Even though Bryant and Milam both admitted to kidnapping Emmett, the possibility of the two men not even being there to take Emmett is beyond irrational, even when both men stated their names at Moses 's door.

In 1915, a Jewish businessman Leo Frank was falsely accused of killing a worker, Mary Phlegem, in the pencil factory he managed. When the Georgia governor reduced Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment due to lack of evidence, a mob dragged him and lynched him. He was given a posthumous pardon decades later when the evidence pointed to a janitor at the factory. Leo Frank tragedy caused “a ripple effect of fear among Jewish immigrants and Jewish Americans” (Anti-semitism in America). The lynching of Leo Frank was the beginning of two long decades of prejudicsm and hatred towards Jewish Americans in interwar America.

He then launches into a long tangent of how gluttony and drunkenness are the roots of all sin. He then continues to tell of three drunkards in a tavern, who looked outside on a funeral knell to see a corpse being carried down the street. One of them sends a slave to see who the corpse was only to find out that he was an old companion of his whose heart was smashed by a stealthy thief named Death. The three drunkards became rioters as they decide to avenge their dead companion by destroying Death. After walking for about half a mile, the threesome ran into a pitiful old man who had been waiting for Death to come to take his heart.

The article titled, “Govt. Powerless To Interfere Says Attorney General”, showed the unwillingness of the federal government to outlaw lynchings. Senator Robert F. Wagner had sent Attorney General Homer Cummings, a telegram, to look into the events of two lynchings in Mississippi and Georgia. According to one report, a mob shot and killed an African-American blacksmith named Tom Green for killing his white boss due to a wage dispute.

Lee was born in Edwards, Mississippi in 1904. His mother died while he was a child, and this put a damper his childhood. Despite this, he persevered and graduated from high school. In the 1930’s he became a preacher in the town of Belzoni, a town where many African Americans lived, most in extreme poverty. Later he opened a grocery store and also ran a printing press with his wife out of his house.

Emmett Till, a 14 year old African-American, was brutally murdered racists. When Emmett was little he had a slight studded due to polio. He was born on July 25, 1921 and lived in Chicago, Illinois with his mother, Mamie Till Mobley. Emmett went to visit family in Money, Mississippi where he supposedly whistled at a white women and was brutally murdered after. Though he went to a segregated school he, he faced little racism compared to those in the south.

In the 1920’s women could rarely land a job Challenged male domination If women did get a job, they received lower paychecks than men Discrimination were everywhere Women had to demand for their own rights; did everything that they had to do The MAIN problem was suffrage; women had to fight for their votes While men had many choices for jobs, women were limited with their choices

The United States is often referred to as ‘the melting pot’ because of the different ethnicities and races that American society is composed of. Indeed, the United States presents an interesting phenomenon of coexistence of different cultures. Yet, it is important to understand that differences often lead to power imbalances, and the United States, does not deny that it has become a victim of it. For many centuries, American society was shackled with different types of historical inequalities, including ethnic, racial, sexual, class, and gender inequalities. We do not deny that the United States also has a shameful experience of the most rigid system of racial discrimination for one of our minority groups, such as slavery.