A4 I FEBRUARY 8,2017
BERTIE LEDGER-ADVANCE
Opinion
One-on-one
The fabric of Bertie County since 1832
Emmett Till
lives on...
“America is still killing Emmett Till,”
writes Duke professor Timothy Tyson in
his new book, “The Blood of Emmett Till.”
//.
Tyson revisits
the 1955
kidnapping and
brutal killing of
Till."
D.G. MARTIN
T y -
s o n
re vis- ,
its the
19 5 5
kidnap-
p i n g
and
brutal
killing of Till, a 14-year-old black youth
from Chicago visiting relatives in Missis
sippi. At a country store. Till’s encounter
with an attractive white woman broke the
“color code” and prompted her husband
and brother-in-law to punish him.
Tyson’s book gained immediate national
attention because the woman changed her
version of what Emmett Till had said and
done to her in the encounter that led to
Till’s murder. Carolyn Bryant Donham told
Tyson her earlier statements that Till had
made sexually explicit statements to her
and grabbed her were, as she told Tyson,
“That part is not true.”
While Donham’s revised version of the
1955 events grabbed the headlines, it is
only a part of the mosaic of racism and
oppression Tyson lays out. His detailed
description of her husband’s family’s insta
bility and racism would fit the Appalachian
families described in “Hillbilly Elegy,” the
recent bestseller by J.D. Vance.
On the other side of the racial divide,
Tyson poignantly describes the indignities
suffered by Till’s mother’s family in Missis
sippi. Never look a white person in the eye.
Never say or do anything that could be
viewed as disrespectful. Do not attempt to
register to vote. Violating these or multiple
other rules by a Mississippi black could
lead to loss of employment, burnings, mid
night gunshots into your house, brutal
beatings, or death.
While the racism in Chicago, was not
quite so brutal, the dehumanization and
violence were so similar to the situation
in Mississippi that parts of Chicago were
known as “Little Mississippi.”
Tyson revisits the horrible details of
Till’s kidnapping by Donham’s husband,
Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law, J. W.
Malam, the brutal beating and gunshot
through Till’s head that ended his life, and
the attempt to hide his body by attaching a
heavy fan to his body with barbed wire and
tossing it into a nearby river.
A few days later, however. Till’s bloated
and mangled body was discovered and
ultimately returned to Chicago, where his
mother insisted on an open-casket funeral.
The murders of other blacks who violated
race codes in Mississippi and o};her south
ern states never captured the attention of
the public as profoundly as the widely pub
licized images of Till’s brutalized body.
Tyson writes that four days later a Mont
gomery city bus driver told her to move to
the back. Thinking of Emmett Till, “Parks
refused to do so. Her subsequent arrest
provided the occasion for the Montgomery
Bus Boycott.”
More importantly, according to Tyson,
“the impact of the Till lynching resonated
across America for years, touching virtu
ally everyone who heard.”
Tyson says, for instance, that it motivat
ed North Carolina A&T students who be
gan a sit-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro
on February 1, 1960. Within a few days stu
dents in other parts of North Carolina were
sitting in at segregated lunch counters. He
writes, “A new, mass-based phase of the
civil rights movement, a distinctive radi
calism rooted in nonviolent direct action,
had begun.
Tyson writes that the recent national
movement born of the killings of Michael
Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other
similar killings, continues the tradition as
“young protesters throughout the United
States chanted, ‘Say his name! Emmett
Till!”’
Nevertheless, Tyson hopes that “diffi
cult as it is to bear, his story can leave us
reaching for our better angels and moving
toward higher ground.”
D.G. Martin hosts “North Carolina Book-
watch. ”
Farm life wife
Superheroes in our midst
■ ■ ■
Marvel dominates the super
hero and villain comic literary
genre with aplomb. Each month
it seems there is a new movie out
about this hero or that hero fixing
all the world’s ills and dominating
the villains.
Don’t get me wrong -1 love them
- Iron Man, Captain America and
Ant Man being among my favor
ites...movies, that is.
In doing my research last week,
1 realized we have superheroes in
our midst that will never grace
the silver .screen.
They don’t fly through space
or swing from webbing attached
to tall buildings but they do help
those who cannot help them
selves.
Rev. White, a pastor from Wind
sor, worked in the trenches of
Baltimore, Md. among those ad
dicted to drugs and alcohol point
ing them where to get help when
a test for AIDS gave them a wake-
up call.
He tells story after story of
turned-around lives because they
came in contact with someone
who cared and looked past the
social ills straight to the heart.
White put aside his comfort
Today in N.C.
"These are the
kind of
superheroes
the world
really needs."
- DEBORAH GRIFFIN
zone to reach out to those society
had given up on and threw away
with the garbage.
Another superhero in our midst
is Jamesville Mayor Pro Tempore
and Commissioner Willis Wil
liams.
He grew up in a racially heated
time in rural Jamesville and could
have easily become bitter from
the injustices he witnessed first
hand.
He credits his parents for steer
ing him down a different road.
They instilled in him the value
of education and loving God and
others. These are forces behind
his superpowers to help those
who cannot help themselves.
He has been confined to a wheel
chair since 2008, directly related
to injuries he received while serv
ing in the Air Force during the
Vietnam War.
Both sides now...
These are busy times for “politi
cal pretzels,” the contortionists
who are party diehards.
If they stick with their party in
Raleigh, they will contradict their
party in Washington, and vice ver
sa. Or, because administrations
flipped in Raleigh, they may now
disagree with a practice they sup
ported before January 1.
In Raleigh, the state Senate
will initiate confirmation hear
ings for Gov. Roy Cooper’s cabi
net secretaries. Sen. Bill Rabon,
R-Brunswick, says he’s looking
for potential conflicts of interest.
Democrats are suing.
Exploring for conflicts of inter
est is exactly what Democratic
senators in Washington have
done with President Trump’s
cabinet nominees, so angering
Republican committee chairmen
that they’ve been obstructing the
reviews.
At one such hearing two years
ago, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions
asked Sally Yates if she would
defy, as deputy attorney general,
an illegal order from then-Presi-
dent Barack Obama.
Yates gave Sessions the answer
he wanted: Yes. Then, last month,
she defied President Trump and
immediately got fired. Now the
table has been turned on Sessions
and he is being asked his own
question in his own confirmation
hearings for attorney general: Will
he stand up to Trump?
It’s a question then-N.C. At
torney General Cooper answered
several times in the last four
years, refusing to defend Republi-
Traveling home to North Caro
lina from California, after being
honorably discharged in 1966, he
was asked to move to the back of
the bus because of the color of
his skin.
Never mind that he was in
jured.
And never mind that he had just
been serving his country for free
dom of others.
Talk about adding insult to in
jury.
He is currently an advocate and
a mediator for the poor and has
changed laws that govern our
county so that the scales of jus
tice lean in a more balanced man
ner.
These are the kind of superhe
roes our world really needs. Sorry
Marvel.
These men have quietly worked
to change the world for the better,
never asking for attention. They
are the type of men I will point
my two boys to - to look up to and
pattern their lives after.
Deborah Griffin is Staff Writer for
the Bertie Ledger-Advance. She can
be reached via email at dgriffin®
ncweeklies and at (252) 792-1181.
"Pretzels
aren't good
for you
either."
-PAUL O’CONNOR
can legislative actions he consid
ered unconstitutional. And every
time. Republicans howled that he
wasn’t doing his job.
Former Secretary Donald van
der Vaart liked working in Gov.
Pfit McCrory’s Department of En
vironmental Quality so much that
after Cooper beat McCrory he de
moted himself, taking a protected
civil service job to stay employed.
Usually, cabinet secretaries leave
with their governor.
Nice trick. But shouldn’t Coo
per still be able to fire van der
Vaart and hire his own people?
If he does, he’ll run into a case
before the N.C. Supreme Court.
John Ledford, a Democrat and
former director of N.C. Alcohol
Law Enforcement, is the plaintiff.
He demoted himself four years
ago just before McCrory replaced
Gov. Bev Perdue. McCrory fired
Ledford, and Ledford is suing to
get his job and back pay. It’s all
very confusing.
Among the confused must be
the N.C. Supreme Court justices;
Democrats now hold a majority
of seats. Their decision will make
one Democrat happy and one sad.
Their only recourse might be to
put politics aside and follow the
law, if anyone knows what that is.
(An aside: Remember the Re
publican criticism of Obama’s
Supreme Court choices as all Ivy
League elitists? Trump’s nominee,
Neil Gorsuch, has degrees from
Columbia and Harvard, same re
sume as Obama. He also has a
Ph.D. earned at Bill Clinton’s old
school, Oxford in England. Gor
such is a real everyman.)
Cooper fired David Prickett,
a Health and Human Services
spokesperson. Prickett’s suing
to keep his job. In the first weeks
of most new administrations,
spokespersons, or “flacks” as re
porters call them, are replaced.
McCrory hired his own flacks in
2013.
Flacks mouth the boss’s pro
paganda, and why anyone would
want to first justify McCrory and
then Cooper is a mystery to me.
Maybe Prickett needs the job. I
sympathize with him.
But, Republicans who cheer for
him today had better understand
that if he wins and sets legal prec
edent they’ll be stuck with Demo
crats as mouthpieces for the next
Republican governor.
Most of us either support con
firmation hearings or not, sup
port executive hiring decisions
or not. Pretzels just contradict
themselves and support whatever
their party tells them to support.
Remember that old saying about
what’s good for the goose and the
gander? Pretzels aren’t good for
you either.
Paul T. O’Connor has covered
state government for 39 years.
Bertie
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