Author: Timothy B. Tyson
Quotes of Author: Timothy B. Tyson
These are the facts. But we are obliged to go beyond the facts of the lynching and grapple with its meaning. If we refuse to look beneath the surface, we can simply blame some Southern white peckerwoods and a bottle of corn whiskey. We can lay the responsibility of Emmett Till's terrible fate on the redneck monsters of the south and congratulate ourselves for not being one of them. We can also place, and over the decades many of us have placed, some percentage of the blame on Emmett, who should have known better, should have watched himself, policed his thoughts and deeds, gone more quietly through the Delta that summer. Had he only done so, he would have found his way back to Chicago unharmed. That we blame the murderous pack is not the problem; even the idea that we can blame the black boy is not so much the problem, though it carries with it several absurdities. The problem is why we blame them. We blame them to avoid seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend. book-quoteThere was at least one way that Chicago was actually more segregated than Mississippi. A demographic map of the city in 1950 shows twenty-one distinct ethnic neighborhoods: German, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech and Slovak, Scottish, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican, French, and Hungarian, among others.5 These ethnic groups divided Chicago according to an unwritten treaty, which clearly stated that Germans, for instance, would live on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest Side, and African Americans in the South Side's "Black Belt. book-quote
