Instituional Discrimination

Institutional Discrimination

It breaks my heart every time I read about incidents as in the murder of Emmett Till and the Little Rock Nine. It is hard for me to grasp why people can be so mean to each other based upon their religion, ethnicity, or in this case their skin color. We were all created in an image to be unique from one another and yet many still criticize each other because we are all different.

In the events that took place with the murder of Emmett Till, I was shocked to read the very descriptive wording. In August 1955, Emmett Till stated to a white store owner’s wife “Bye baby” because he was dared by a few of him friends. A few days later, the store owner, Roy Bryant, and his brother-in-law, J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from his uncles house one night. Three days later his body was found looking nothing like himself because of the destruction done to his body. No white lawyer would take this case. In the end though, Bryant and Milam were found innocent because the jurors were basically threatened with their lives. Hearing this court decision just astonishes me because the jurors know that Bryant and Milam are completely guilty because all the evidence is there to convict them. The main reason though that these two men were able to get out of being found guilty was because their skin tone was white. And because their skin tone was white, they were considered better than to be proven guilty by blacks.

Many of the same discriminations took place in the Little Rock Nine incident. Nine black students in Little Rock, Arkansas were placed into an all white school. As a result, these nine black students faced horrible treatments by the white students while having patrollers around. The white mobbed attacked these nine students causing one of them to be stabbed and have acid sprayed into their eyes. Once the patrollers left, the nine students had to protect themselves. From all that