Monday, February 9, 2009

Struggling to be Free: The Civil Rights Movement

What I find most interesting about this section is that it brings up a couple incidents that I never heard of. As a student with many history classes (6 collegiate) under my belt, I'm surprised that I haven't heard of these incidents. The first was the story of Emmet Till: what got me the most about his story was just visiting Mississippi when he was brutally battered. He was just a kid from Chicago visiting family, happened to cat-call a white woman, and got beat to death for it. It's cases like these that are the frightening aspects of racial prejudice: Till was a vulnerable 14-year-old and none of the adult men who did it thought twice about beating and killing a child just because his skin color was different than theirs. It's possible that no one would have found out about this, and those men would never be found out-- but when they were, they were acquitted. Acquitted from charges of savage, fatal brutality to an innocent child. This cycle of bloodthirsty racial prejudice still carries on today-- though, legally (thank goodness), criminals in these cases are actually punished if they are found out.

The other topic I didn't know about was the Freedom Riders who attempted to ride on buses throughout the South. They were beaten in three different areas-- Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi-- even though bus-segregation was coming to an end.

No comments:

Post a Comment