Getting Away With Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case by Chris Crowe

People will experience inequality at least one point in their life. Whether it’s being treated differently than others, receiving criticism, or even being discriminated against. In the short story, Getting Away With Murder: The True Story of the Emmett Till Case, the author Chris Crowe emphasizes the constant inequality and injustice African Americans had to face daily in the South (specifically Mississippi in this case) during the mid-1900s by adequately explaining a young Black boy, Emmett Till’s life story and a devastating case in depth.

After murder

Emmett Till was a young Black boy born and raised in Chicago. He grew up in a segregated neighborhood and went to an all-Black school. However, that didn’t stop him from having a good life. Till spent most of his time interested in sports, girls, and having fun just like any other ordinary young teenager. He also had many friends, was known and admired by his neighbors, and lived with his mother, Mamie Till Bradley in a comfortable six-room apartment.

That was until he had to travel to a small town in Mississippi to visit his family during the summer of 1955. Till had learned and heard about the racial commotion in Mississippi and other Southern states including the Supreme Court decision that made school segregation illegal, also known as Brown v. Board of Education in May 1954. But as a young teenager who had just finished the seventh grade, the events didn’t move or interest him in any way. On the other hand, racist whites living in Mississippi and other Southern states were enraged by the new ruling.

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U.S. Congressman John Bell Williams claimed that the Supreme Court was destroying the Southern way of life and went out of his way to prevent desegregation. In addition, many anti-Black groups were also created outside the government to block integration such as the White Citizens’ Council, which was a white-collar version of the Ku Klux Klan. Life in the South was extremely hard especially for African Americans as the Jim Crow laws restricted them from living their lives sufficiently.

Being born and raised in Chicago, Till had little to no knowledge of the tense and hazardous climate, policies, and taboos in the South and took his mother’s worried lessons and warnings lightly and jokingly. His lack of experience with Southern customs, reluctance to listen to his mother’s advice, and his adamant sense of invincibility drove him to violate one of the South’s most biggest taboos when racial tensions were severely sensitive.