What Is The Blood Of Emmett Till By Timothy B. Tyson

The book I read was, “The Blood of Emmett Till” by Timothy B. Tyson. This book is about a 14 year-old boy named Emmett who went to Mississippi to spend time with his family, but ended up making a mistake that cost him his life. I’m going to talk about one big idea I found in the book, which also relates to, “Night” by Elie Wiesel. The big idea I found was that too much power and the fear of losing power can corrupt the mind.

Throughout history whites have been known to be narcissistic and power hungry. The desire for power and the power they thought they had, clouded their vision and thinking of what was moral and what wasn’t. For example, when whites first saw the blacks they immediately thought that they were superior. However, the whites were also threatened by them,

Then, when the blacks got freedom the southern whites went crazy, they were threatened by the blacks more than ever before. Again, thinking that they were superior, the whites in the south segregated the blacks. The whites would treat the blacks as if they were the plague. If one touched you, people would freak. If a black just barley grazes the water in a white only pool they’d drain it, down to the very last drop. It is said in, “The Blood of Emmett Till” that between 1946 and 1953 in Chicago, if a black moved into an all-white neighborhood the “alarmed white residents would quickly sell their homes,” again treating the blacks as if they were some kind of disease, in fear of losing power. This isn’t even the worst thing they had done, the southern whites were so threatened by the blacks and so corrupted with power that they would form mobs and try to make people move out of their homes. Tyson tells us in, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” that on August 9th, 1953, a few days after Betty and Donald Howard moved into the all-white neighborhood of Trumbull Park Homes, “a mob of two thousand angry whites was throwing bricks and fire bombs...” at the Howard’s home trying to scare them into