Yesterday marked 69 years since the brutal lynching of 14-year-old negro Emmett Till, who allegedly flirted with a white girl in a grocery store in Drew, Mississippi.
Such a tragedy.
You may have heard of Emmett Till – but do you know about his absent father?
Well, Louis Till constantly cheated on his wife, Mamie, Emmett’s mother, and used to beat her like a rented mule; and one day he even choked her to near death. She eventually got a restraining order against him, which he repeatedly violated. To avoid imprisonment, he enlisted in the US Army and never saw Mamie or Emmett again.
Then, toward the end of World War II, while serving in Italy, Louis Till killed an Italian woman in cold blood with a stolen pistol and raped two other women.
He was subsequently hanged for his crimes. He was 23 years old.
Oddly enough, American poet Ezra Pound, who was imprisoned for collaborating with the Nazis alongside Louis Till, mentioned him in his work The Pisan Cantos:
Pisa, in the 23rd year of the effort in sight of the Tower
And Till was hung yesterday
for murder and rape with trimmings.
This reminds me of the old saying, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
