Aufgabe Vorschlag B2 - 2 · Abitur Hessen Englisch GK 2022

Material 1

Eliott C. McLaughlin, Emanuella Grinberg: Justice Department reopens investigation into 63-year-old murder of Emmett Till (2018)

The investigation of the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till [in 1955], barbarous even in an era in which blacks in the South were subjected to untold viciousness, has been reopened based on “new information,” according to a US Justice Department report to Congress.

[…] Emmett’s savage murder jolted 1 a nation, spurring it to action on civil rights. Gruesome photos of the boy’s mutilated body spread across the globe, lending jarring visuals 2 to the stories of violence and discrimination coming out of the South.

Ninety-five days after the attack, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

Emmett’s crime? He had been accused – we now know, falsely – of flirting with and making advances at then-21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, who, along with her husband, Roy, owned a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett had traveled there from Chicago to visit his great-uncle, who lived in the area.

Four days later, on August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, rousted Emmett from his bed 3 in the middle of the night, ordered him into the bed of a pickup 4 and eventually beat him viciously before shooting him in the head.

His murderers then strapped a 75-pound cotton gin fan 5 to his neck with barbed wire so it would weigh him down when they tossed him in the Tallahatchie River.

Not a month after the boy’s body was pulled from the river, an all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam of Emmett’s murder, despite eyewitnesses identifying the defendants and the men confessing to kidnapping the teen. Testifying for the defense, Carolyn Bryant offered incendiary 6 testimony accusing Emmett of grabbing and verbally threatening her. Deliberations 7 took barely an hour, with one juror claiming the acquittal could’ve come sooner had they not stopped to have a soda.

In closing arguments, the defense team appealed to jurors’ heritage, saying their ancestors would turn in their graves if they didn’t free these fine, white men. Weeks later, a grand jury would decline to indict Bryant and Milam on kidnapping charges.

Bryant and Milam told a reporter the following year how they killed Emmett and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie, but because of double jeopardy laws 8, they couldn’t be tried again.

In a January 1956 Look magazine article, titled, “The shocking story of approved killing in Mississippi,” Bryant and Milam said they went looking for the “Chicago boy” with the initial intent of scaring him and putting him in his place.

But Emmett didn’t scare. […] Milam said Emmett’s insolence in the face of their attempts to frighten him left them with no choice, the magazine reported:

“Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully; I never hurt a n* in my life. I like n*s – in their place – I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, n*s are gonna stay in their place. N*s ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids. And when a n* gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that n* throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going to make an example of you – just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’”

[…] Emmett’s death remains a symbol of “enduring American injustice” to this day, said Duke University scholar Timothy Tyson, author of “The Blood of Emmett Till.” The book included the bomb-shell admission from Carolyn Bryant – by then, Carolyn Bryant Donham – that she made up the damning allegations of Emmett’s verbal and physical advances. […]

[Priscilla Sterling, a cousin of Emmett, said:] “I’m glad it’s being talked about and discussed, with the division this country is experiencing and white supremacist guys thinking they can do everything. If this case is talked about and discussed maybe they will be stopped.”

Another cousin, Wheeler Parker, said he hopes Emmett’s name can be cleared soon and prove that “he didn’t die in vain.”

(734 Wörter)

Eliott C. McLaughlin, Emanuella Grinberg: Justice Department reopens investigation into 63-year-old murder of Emmett Till, in: CNN online, 13.07.2018, URL: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/12/us/emmett-till-murder-case-reopened-doj/index.html (abgerufen am 11.04.2021).

Annotations

1 to jolt – to shock, to surprise

2 jarring visuals – shocking pictures

3 to roust sb from their bed – to drive sb from their bed roughly

4 bed of a pickup – offene Ladefläche eines Fahrzeugs

5 cotton gin fan – Ventilator einer Baumwollentkörnungsmaschine

6 incendiary – causing trouble

7 deliberations – discussion by the jury about the verdict

8 double jeopardy law – Gesetz gegen Doppelbestrafung für einen bereits verhandelten Fall

2 Compare the murder case of Emmett Till to the Tom Robinson case in “To Kill a Mockingbird”.

(40 BE)