Freedom Bound

In 1955 Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, was murdered in Money: a small town in the Yazoo Delta. His body was found tied to an iron cotton-gin wheel at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. In spite of overwhelming evidence, an all-white jury acquitted J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, who had been accused of murder. Later the murderers were paid four thousand dollars to tell how they killed Emmett. The reporter, William B. Huie, published the story in Look magazine. No action was taken against Milam and Bryant. This was one more added to the list of thousands of killings of blacks (Walter p.10). African Americans have endured bad treatment throughout American history: from being enslaved on plantations to being …show more content…
Thereafter racism took new forms, ceding blacks to limited rights while confining them to the bottom rungs of a caste system based on color and sanctioned by the highest courts . Although African Americans were freed from slavery, they were never really freed from the mindset that they were “nothing”. During slavery, African Americans were seen as little and given little, after slavery, again, African Americans were seen as little and given little. Four million African Americans received little to no land as compensation for their slave labor; rather, they were set free without resources in a region devastated by wa. Most freedmen contracted to work white-owned farms for a minimal livelihood, incurring debts that bound them to the land in virtual serfdom. In practice they could survive only at the hands of white planters, merchants, and creditors (Westbrot p.4)Even though slavery had ended, African Americans still had to depend on whites to survive. Again, they were stripted of their hope and pride while white power was