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Henry Pettigrew was 12 years old on the day his friend Emmett Till’s body was laid out, in a dark suit and a white shirt, for all Chicago to see.
It was a sunny day, Pettigrew remembers, and he joined the line of thousands outside Roberts Temple at 40th and State streets on the South Side, waiting his turn to file past the casket.
He and Emmett had met in Sunday school, and even though Emmett was a little older, they discovered a lot in common. Both were bashful boys. Both liked to read. Both sang in the church choir, though neither sang well. They liked to tease each other, like about whose feet were big and whose weren’t. They both stuttered.
Oooooooooooohhh, how sad!
Yr killin' me with all this tearjerkin' ! The waterworks just won't stop!“I went to visit his grave today at Lot 218,” he emailed. “I was 12-and-a-half years old when he was murdered. His death was my introduction to the horrors associated with racism … I have missed him all of my life.”
Of course not.Until Till was killed, Pettigrew says, he didn’t think a lot about skin color.
LOLAfter Till’s murder, he says, “for a while, I just thought that being white was the worst thing you could be.”
They let this dumb fucking ape be a cop?Still, the memory of Emmett’s death travels with him. When he was a police officer, Emmett would come to mind whenever he arrested a white person.
Alright, I've had enough of this Emmett Till shit, him and his nigger pals can go fuck off already.A while back, when he was dating a white woman — “she passed away last year” — he’d sometimes think of what happened to Emmett. He never told her about his fears.
https://www.heraldcourier.com/opinio...e61c05ca7.html
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