Timothy B. Tyson Quote
Emmett Till's death was an extreme example of the logic of America's national racial caste system. To look beneath the surface of these facts is to ask ourselves what our relationship is today to the legacies of that caste system - legacies that still end the lives of young African Americans for no reason other than the color of their American skin and the content of our national character. Recall that Faulkner, asked to comment on the Till case when he was sober, responded, 'If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't.' Ask yourself whether America's predicament is really so different now.
Emmett Till's death was an extreme example of the logic of America's national racial caste system. To look beneath the surface of these facts is to ask ourselves what our relationship is today to the legacies of that caste system - legacies that still end the lives of young African Americans for no reason other than the color of their American skin and the content of our national character. Recall that Faulkner, asked to comment on the Till case when he was sober, responded, 'If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't.' Ask yourself whether America's predicament is really so different now.
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About Timothy B. Tyson
His books have won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, the James A. Rawley Prize (OAH), the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, and the Southern Book Award. In addition, two of his books, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (1998) and Blood Done Sign My Name (2004), have been adapted into films, and the latter was also adapted into a play.
In 2017, Tyson published The Blood of Emmett Till, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award and was longlisted for the National Book Award, but which was later subject to controversy regarding a reported confession made by Till's accuser Carolyn Bryant to Tyson which could not be substantiated.