Jesse Washington : A Short Story

It was the beginning of October, and a 17-year-old teenager was hiding by a chain link fence. He had just stolen a purse from a nearby house, and a neighbor had called the police. An officer by the name of Elton Hymon had arrived and was trying to arrest the kid, whose name was Edward Garner. Garner began to climb the 6-foot fence, and Officer Hymon,

- “In an act of extraordinary bravery, Moses Wright took the stand and identified Bryant and Milam as Till's kidnappers and killers. At the time, it was almost unheard of for blacks to openly accuse whites in court, and by doing so Wright put his own life in grave danger.”

Jumping back into the past, Gregory Orr tells the incident when he and a group of five hundred of men, women, teenagers, and old folks assemble in Jackson, Mississippi. In Jackson for a peaceful demonstration, Gregory Orr and the rest of the group were arrested and taken away “to the county fairgrounds” (128, 1). Where they was beaten by officers of the law, Orr stated, “I emerged into the outdoors and the bright sunlight and saw them-two lines of about fifteen highway patrolmen on either side. I was ordered to walk, not run, between them. Again I was beaten with nightsticks, but this time more thoroughly, as I was the only target” (129, 2). Once freed from his captors, Gregory Orr gets in his car to head back north, but on his way back he was pulled over by flashing lights. Thinking it was the police; Gregory Orr pulled over and was approached by two white men. One of the white men said, “Get out, you son of a bitch, or I’ll blow your head off” (133, 3). The two white men takes Gregory Orr’s wallet and tell him to follow them, Scared for his life, Gregory Orr did exactly what the two men told him to do. After following the two men, Gregory Orr is back in jail in Hayneville. “Already depressed and disoriented by the ten days in jail in Jackson, I was even more frightened in Hayneville,” (136, 1) stated by Gregory Orr.

On August 28, 1955, fourteen year old Emmett Till was beaten, tortured and shot. Then with barbed wire wrapped around his neck and tied to a large fan, his body was discarded into the Tallahatchi River. What was young Emmett’s offense that brought on this heinous reaction of two grown white men? When he went into a store to buy some bubble gum he allegedly whistled at a white female store clerk, who happened to be the store owner’s wife. That is the story of the end of Emmett Till’s life. Lynchings, beatings and cross-burning had been happening in the United States for years. But it was not until this young boy suffered an appalling murder in Mississippi that the eyes of a nation were irrevocably opened to the ongoing horrors of racism in

June 19, 1975, began a killing spree in Colorado Springs when a soldier from Ft.Carson and his friend who worked on base shot a cook in the head. He only had fifty cents. The next week they stabbed a Fort Carson soldier with a bayonet. On July 1, 1975, they killed Kelsey Grammer’s sister. After raping her, they stabbed her throat and left her out in a trailer park to die. That night they went to Fort Carson and called a cab from a club. That pick up would be Dad’s last. Knowing he was in trouble, Dad called dispatch to ask the distance and the fare to Butts Field, a strange request for a seasoned cabbie on such a small military base. All the fares were thirty five cents except the one to their airport. One of the guys grabbed my dad and slashed his throat from ear to ear, leaving him for dead on the side of the road. They drove the cab through the housing area, across one of its inhabitants front lawns. He had driven a taxi in New York and had his money taken before, but never harmed. Mom laughed hysterically when she told me that even with witnesses, their attorney argued it was too dark to adequately identify them.The local police investigated Karen’s murder, but my dad’s killing had taken place on a military base, putting the federal agents in charge. The murderers were given the death sentence for Karen and the other murders, so the feds decided not to investigate my dad’s case.

On September 19, 1955 Emmett’s murder had became an outrage. Because blacks and women were not allowed to serve jury duty, Bryant and Milam were judged in front of an all white male jury. At the end of the case the two white men were found innocent. This really made a lot of chaos. To add to the madness, a couple months later they admitted the crime to Look magazine for four thousand dollars.

In 1931 two white women were riding the train along with the other men (the blacks and whites). When the fight broke out the blacks had won and let the white men off the train, however when the white men got off the train, they reported the incident to the local sheriff and that’s when the train stopped in Scottsboro, Alabama and everyone on the train was arrested. That’s how it all started in Scottsboro, Alabama and it was just the beginning of the case. The two women on the train Victoria Price and Ruby Bates were about to be in serious trouble because Ruby Bates was a minor and in that time it was a federal crime to take a minor across state lines for the reason of prostitution. The only way they could get of trouble in their situation was to say the black men raped them. In the time of 1931 rape was sanctioned by death. Usually they would’ve responded by a lynching, which was when they hung someone who was suspected of a crime, but for this case the citizens of Scottsboro wanted to hold a trial instead. The trial wasn’t fair at all because the outcome had been decided before the trial even

This question is important because it first reveals how American cities “simmered with hatred, deeply divided as always…. Time and again in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, urban white proved themselves capable of savagery toward their black neighbors…” (6). Unless documented in novels such as Arc of Justice, the deep racism and brutal mistreatment of black people in the past may fade away from memory. The question is also important because it explains how “the Sweet case did help move America away from the brutal intolerance of the

On the morning before the lynchings, Harrison drove to the house of Dorothy Malcom's parents, who had begged with him to get Roger Malcom out of jail since the stabbing occurred. Harrison refused to pick him up at first, but suddenly changed his mind. Harrison took along with him Dorothy Malcom , who was pregnant at the time, and George Mae Murray Dorsey to Monroe. Their Harrison signed a $600 bond to bail Roger Malcom out of jail. Harrison, with the two black couples in his car, left the county jail at about 5:30 p.m. on July 25, 1946, and headed back along the Athens Highway toward his farm. Authorities said the route he chose was the longest way home, along a winding dirt road (Suggs,C4). According to Harrison, when he reached the bridge at Moore's Ford, a car blocked his way (Rivers,1). A mob of twenty to twenty-five unmasked men stopped him at gunpoint (Suggs, C1). Then they took the two couples into the woods, tied them to the trees and shot them. They were so savagely beaten and overwhelmed with bullets that their bodies were ripped to shreds. " The only way to tell the bodies apart was by their lips." Investigator Bobby Howard said. When questioning Harrison he told the local authorities and the FBI he could not identify any members of the mob or explain how they knew which way he was coming home. No one was ever prosecuted for the slayings of the African Americans and why it happened is

While Wes Moore (author) was preparing for Oxford and having his story illuminated in the Baltimore Sun, the other Wes Moore was arrested for robbery, along with his brother, and was charged with murder; they would most likely receive the death penalty. Because Wes (author) couldn’t shake the story and a feeling of connection with the other Wes Moore, he wrote a letter to him. The imprisoned Wes Moore wrote back, and so began a correspondence. While spending time with Wes, the author discovered that “ generation of young men, boys who came of age during a historically chaotic and violent time and emerged to succeed and fail in unprecedented ways”

Family relationships and society play fundamental roles in how a child grows and makes their own choices. How they are seen and treated by society can influence how the child acts. From how they are raised, to what values and morals they are taught will determine the child’s reactions to obstacles that come up in life. I will be discussing some major events in the book that stood out to me as to why two men who basically grew up on the same block, ended up on very different paths.

In a 22 month span, starting in July 1979, 30 African American children and young men were murdered or disappeared in Atlanta, Georgia (Nickell 1 of 2). Due to the various motives that each murder presented, it was believed that multiple individuals were responsible for these crimes. However only 1 person was ultimately charged with these homicides. The person that was found responsible for 2 of the many murders is Wayne Williams. He was suspected and subsequently arrested after police heard a splash in the water under a bridge on May 22, 1981, and Williams was the only one on the bridge during the time frame of the body drop (Plummer 1 of 3). This case was splashed all over headlines both nationally and internationally (Nickell 1 of 2). Due

This story is set in the year 1930, in Maycomb County, Alabama, and even though racism was abolished, the people still believed that colored people were bad people. Without racism still existing then, many things wouldn’t have happened. Since there was racism, a man was accused to be guilty for a crime he didn’t commit because he was black. Which allowed the actual guilty and dangerous person out on the loose, which gave him the chance to try to kill two kids. But without racism, the the guilty man would be put in jail and the whole story would be over.

the prisoners were lucky enough to escape the being lynched when they were moved into Scottsboro. In this trial, nine young, black boys were charged with the rape of two white girls while on a train. This case was a major source of controversy in the 1930’s. “Despite testimony by doctors who had examined the women that no rape had occurred, the all- white jury convicted the nine, and all but the youngest, who was 12 years old were sentenced to death” (“Scottsboro”). The boys’ lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz, did not even get assigned to the case until the first day of the trial. “If he could show a jury that these nine boys were innocent, as the record indicated, the jury would surely free them. To Leibowitz, that was simple!” (Chalmers 35). However, it was not that simple. Many white citizens would not change their minds about

The South had many brutal beating and lynchings of African-Americans. One horrific event was Emmett Till. Emmett was a 14 year old African-American boy that was originally from Chicago, Illinois, but he was visiting family in Mississippi. He was in town with his cousins and they went into a drug store to get bubble gum. On their way out, Emmit “flirted” with the woman at the cash register by saying “Bye, baby.” The woman was extremely offended. Her husband was the owner of the store and he was on a business trip, when he returned home the woman told him about what had happened and he was furious. On the night of August 28, 1955, in the middle of the night, the man got the woman’s brother and they went to Emmett’s Great Uncle Mose Wright’s house where Emmett was staying. They forced Emmett into the car and drove him to the Tallahatchie River. The men forced him to carry a 75 pound cotton-gin fan to the river bank. Emmett was forced to remove his clothes and the men beat him nearly to death. They brutally gouged out Emmett’s eye and shot him in the head. The cotton-gin fan was tied to the body and then thrown into the river. The body was found and recovered three days later on August 31, the body looked almost inhuman. The only way the body was identified as Emmett Till, was a ring that had been pasted down through the family that Emmett always worn. Till’s mother Mamie Bradley