An unexamined misfortune intersecting centralization and cultural hegemony is that events outside mainstream America are considered irrelevant. Those of us with an abiding interest in Mississippi find absurdity in the suggestion: Mississippi’s music and literature are extraordinary. Tragic aspects of our history are no less significant. Endless scholarship focuses upon those episodes. In no particular are unfortunate aspects of our past as riveting as incidents involving race.
One can only shape the future. The past is a given. As occurs in polities across the globe which confront the burden of history, ignominious history is definitional. Identity flows therefrom, for the better if one wishes.
Thus the tautologies between Emmett Till’s 1955 murder and Bill Cosby’s 2018 conviction are disturbing. To compare a 14-year-old murder victim, whose death was predicated upon the disparate power between African-Americans in segregated Mississippi, and someone convicted of sexual assault, upon women drugged into oblivion, transgresses all norms of civilized behavior. The two occurrences are not analogous, in any shape, form, or manner.
When, four months after Emmett Till’s murder, Rosa Parks refused to relinquish her seat on a segregated bus — the two events are believed to begin the Civil Rights Movement, she said, “I thought of Emmett Till, and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back, I just couldn’t move.” Invariably Mississippi casts a long shadow in American History disproportionate to our population.
Bill Cosby’s dissembling is nothing new: There are always people, whatever their background, who attack the Rule of Law when respect for social norms is required. When Justice Clarence Thomas was asked about workplace sexual harassment during his 1991 Confirmation Hearings, he was incredulous: “... [F]rom my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
One who attended Yale Law School and served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, being questioned as a routine aspect of Supreme Court nomination, strained credibility to compare himself to powerless people of color in the segregated South who were taken from jail and hung or incinerated; deprived of constitutional criminal protection. To use Southern history, however horrible it has been at times, to defend privileged individuals who suffered no analogous misfortune is odious.
D.C.-based commentator Duvalier Malone allowed otherwise, in the daily newspaper, but the need to prosecute those who contributed to Emmett Till’s fate, belatedly, bears only remotest resemblance to overdue prosecution of Bill Cosby.
The lynching memorial in Montgomery is a reminder that “old times [in the land of cotton] are not forgotten” by victims’ families. People who were literally lynched did not possess the affluence or opportunities that those voicing victimhood today enjoy.
Anatole France captured the callousness of such comparison, in his 1894 novel “The Red Lily,” when he wrote, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread”: The two experience different lives.
To trivialize injustices exacted when civil liberties and criminal justice were denied people of color interferes with intelligent processing of the miscarriage of justice with which Southerners wrestle.
No one likes those hearing one’s woes to respond with “Mine are worse.” Yet it is accurate in this instance: The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till, in 1955 Mississippi, is incomparable with the prosecution of a wealthy 80-year-old entertainer who employed the best defense lawyers that money can buy, in 2018 Pennsylvania.
Mississippians must demand that a reprobate who got what was deserved — as do others confronting changed attitudes towards sexual predation in contemporary America, without regard to race, whether one is Al Franken, Garrison Keillor, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein or African-American — not devalue our history, a past that defines us; hopefully, after coming to terms with it and using lessons learned to create a sophisticated society.
Bill Cosby was convicted at trial, as were the murderers of Medgar Evers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi, the four girls who were killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Alabama, and those who perished in Nazi Death Camps; the common link being that felons reaped what they sowed. Bill Cosby is no victim.
Jay Wiener is a Northsider.
