Mamie Till's warning still holds true in a racist world | Gary Younge | Comment is free | The Guardian: In 1955 Mamie Till sent her 14-year-old son, Emmett, from Chicago to rural Mississippi to spend his summer holiday with family. As she packed him off she gave him some advice about how a black youth should conduct himself in the pre-civil rights south. "If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past," she told him. "Do it willingly."
While in the small town of Money, in the delta region, he either said "Bye, baby" or wolf-whistled at a white woman in a grocery store. Three days later his body was fished out of the Tallahatchie river with a bullet in his skull, an eye gouged out and his forehead crushed on one side.
An all-white jury acquitted two men after just 67 minutes' deliberation. "If we hadn't stopped to drink pop," said one juror, "it wouldn't have taken that long."
