Source: MIH83

In may ways Emmett Till was a casualty of the anger produced by the U.S. Supreme Courts decision in Brown v. Board of Education, handed down on May 17, 1954, first dubbed ‘Black Monday’ by Representative John Bell Williams of Mississipi. Missipi Circuit Court judge Thomas Brady speculated that the mandate to integrate public schools would compel right-minded white men to commit violence against fool-hardy black boys. Killing would be necessary, even unavoidable. ‘If trouble is to come,’ Brady warned in his incendiary manifesto, Black Monday,  ‘we can predict how it will start.’ The detonator would be the ‘supercilious, glib young Negro, who sojourned in Chicago or New York, and who considers the counsel of his elders archiac.’ That black child ‘will perform an obscene act, or make an obscene remark, or a vile overture or assault upon some white girl.’ this violation of segregations most sacred taboo would set off a deluge of white violence against black boys. The foolish doctrine of equality between the races, cautioned Brady, was ‘the reasoning which produces riots, raping and revolutions.’

By Timothy B. Tyson

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