Similarities In The Trayvon Martin And Emmett Till's Cases

1058 Words3 Pages

Some cases have very similar out comes yet the similarity in the Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till cases are eerily close. Both stories seem to be justified tragedies. They are similar in many ways like both teens being murdered on a visit to a family member, the murderers walking free, and the media being careless because of race. Except in the Trayvon martin case many people would like to say it wasn’t racially motivated. The two events happened so many years apart it is hard to believe they are so similar. According to Death in The Delta, summer 1955 fourteen year old Emmett Till visited his great uncle Moses Till in Mississippi. Till worked picking cotton in the scorching heat of the Mississippi sun. Along with four other children, …show more content…

They complained that the NAACP was trying to bring fear and hatred to the people by making this situation a race issue. Clearly they hadn’t seen the lynching of young Emmett till as a hate crime against blacks. On September 6th, The same day as tills funeral service, a grand jury in Mississippi met to indict Milam and Bryant for the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till. They both plead innocent, and were held in jail until the start of the trial. The actual trial lasted only an hour an seven minutes. A white juror boasted that it wouldn’t have taken so long had they not stopped to drink coca cola. Whites were careless and insensitive to the seriousness of the case. The life of a teenage boy was dealt with like it mattered less than a worthless animal. Both, Milam and Bryant were not guilty and set free. This story went viral across the world, newspaper articles posted things like “the life of a negro isn’t worth a whistle” and other touchy headlines. Whitfield, S. …show more content…

That evening, he walked out to the nearby 7-Eleven to get some Skittles and an Arizona Iced Tea. As he walked back home to his father’s house, he caught the attention of George Zimmerman, who was patrolling the neighborhood and called 911 to report "a real suspicious guy." This guy looks like he 's up to no good or he 's on drugs or something," Zimmerman said to the police dispatcher. After discussing his location with the dispatcher, Zimmerman exclaimed, yelled and there were following sounds suggesting he left his vehicle to run after Martin. "Are you following him?" the dispatcher asked and after Zimmerman answered “yep” the dispatcher told him not to follow Trayvon. Minutes later there were calls about the two fighting and sounds of tussling, then Trayvon lay dead in the grass. Saturday July 13, 2013 the George Zimmerman trial began. The jury returned a verdict of not guilty for both second-degree murder and the lesser charge of manslaughter. The jury deliberated for sixteen hours before arriving at a verdict, which was read in court shortly after 10

Open Document