One of the cousin’s of Emmett Till, the black 14-year-old who was murdered in Mississippi’s Jim Crow South in 1955 for flirting with a white woman, told MSNBC that he agreed with comparisons between Till’s case and the death of Trayvon Martin.
Simeon Wright, Till’s cousin, said “there’s a lot of parallels” between the two cases. Martin, he explained, was killed by “a white boy that got out of his truck, armed to the teeth, chased him down, then killed him,” and was, like Till’s killers, eventually acquitted by a jury.
“That tells me that things have not changed as much as people would like to say they have changed,” Wright added.
He expressed confusion about polls showing that Americans believe race relations have improved, and wondered who was being consulted in the surveys: “No one ever asks me something like this. Who are they asking? The bigots?”
