Race and ethnicity  (Page 21/22)

In 1943, Fred Korematsu, with the assistance of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit in federal court arguing that it was unConstitutional to deprive American citizens of the their civil rights without due process of law. The Supreme Court of the United States decided that, in times of great national strife, it was Constitutional to deprive one specific segment of the population of their civil rights because of the potential for harm by that specific group. You might be interested to know that this decision has never been overturned, which means that it is still the law of the land.

The zoot suit riots

During the “Zoot Suit Riots,” 200 United States Navy personnel rioted for four days over the July 4 ^th , 1943 holiday in East L.A.; many Hispanics killed; no military personnel were arrested. The Los Angeles newspapers had published a series of anti-Hispanic articles which exacerbated the situation. (For more information, please visit the following websites: The “Zoot Suit” Riots ; Los Angeles Zoot Suit Riots ; World War Two and the Zoot Suit Riots .)

The murder of emmett till

In 1953, a fourteen year old boy from Chicago convinced his reluctant mother to send him to Mississippi during his summer vacation to visit his uncle and cousins; the boy’s name was Emmett Till. His uncle had a farm a few miles from a very small town, population 300-500. One day Emmett and his cousins decided to go into the town where they visited a small grocery store/meat market. While in the store, Emmett told his cousins that the woman behind the counter was pretty, and then he whistled at her. Emmett Till was black, the woman was white, and this was the American South of Jim Crow segregation.

The woman reached for a shotgun as Till’s cousins grabbed him and ran home as fast as their legs could move. Late that night, three adult, white men came to Till’s uncle’s house and demanded that the boy be brought out, Till’s uncle refused. The men went into the house, found Till, still asleep, picked him up and dragged him, kicking and screaming, out the house. The men took Till to a remote, semi-abandoned barn where perhaps twenty white, adult men, took turns, for the next seven days, beating and torturing the fourteen year old, whose crime was whistling at a white woman.

When Till’s mother was asked to identify her son’s body, she couldn’t recognize her son whose face looked more like a large piece of hamburger meat than a human being. The three men who took Till from his uncle’s house were arrested, tried by an all-white, all-male jury, and acquitted. In 2005, the FBI exhumed Emmett Till’s body, looking for evidence that would allow them to bring federal charges of civil rights abuses against the handful of living men who were involved in the torture and murder of Till. Unfortunately, they failed to find sufficient evidence to present to a grand jury. Thus, the case is closed, and the guilty have either died or gone free since 1953!. (For more information, please visit the following websites: The Murder of Emmett Till ; The History of Jim Crow: The Lynching of Emmett Till ; The Lynching of Emmett Till ; A Timeline of the Emmett Till Case .)