We already tried that, and it didn’t work out so well for certain people. The small town was Money, Miss., population less than a hundred. Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was accused of whistling at a white woman.
They took care of their own all right—their white own.
Emmett Till is the 14-year-old Mississippi boy whom white supremacists brutally murdered in 1955. He is pictured here with his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. Photo courtesy National Museum of African American History and Culture
Jason Aldean’s song has Nashville country music fighting it out over how “woke” they are. With lyrics like, “Try that in a small town. See how far ya make it down the road. Around here we take care of our own,” it’s easy to see why the gloves are off (especially if you watch the video).
Emmett Till made it to the bottom of the Tallahatchie River with a fan motor tied around his neck. That’s how far he got.
I know, the song is “art,” and art is supposed to activate the right brain, the one that doesn’t analyze and judge, but here are some left-brain questions: Which small town? And where? In what time of history? And who exactly is “our own?”
Emmett Till was murdered in 1955, a long time ago. But there’s a peculiar “Southern” tradition continuing here. Let’s look back, even longer ago, to May 21, 1919. A news report in the Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald found that “Will Moore, a Gulfport bootlegger, shot and instantly killed J.H. Rogers, superintendent of the Dantzler Lumber Company’s mill at Ten Mile, yesterday afternoon about 5 o’clock.” Shortly thereafter, a mob captured and lynched Moore.
This newspaper clipping from the Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald on May 21, 1919, reports the lynching of Will Moore after he shot and instantly killed J. H. Rogers. Newspapers.com / Biloxi-Gulfport Daily Herald
In a commentary in the same paper, regular columnist Bostick “Crab” Breland opined that, with this lynching, “Stone County got the first stain on the clean pages of her history” (as it was a newly formed county). He went on to point out: