I was not born at the time of the brutal murder of Emmett Till in 1955. I was born in the sixties. I now serve as a professor at a historically black institution and a historically white institution. This one incident always brings pain and anguish at how this young Black child's life meant absolutely nothing in the South at this time.

It is hard to get students who were born in the late seventies and eighties to see this horrific time in American History of hatred bred violence, and America was once again awakened with the dragging death of James Byrd Jr in 1998, approximately 43 years since the death of Emmett Till.

To see the pictures of his disfigured body, it makes one angry at how a country that spouted equality for all allowed the murders of a young black man to walk free of justice. The increase in hate crimes are back. It always puts me in a very sad and melancholy mood when I do research on Emmett Till for class lecutres.

Even though it has been 44 years since his death, all I can think of is the amount of suffering and pain that this child endured before his death. I am thankful that there is a GOD!!! Black Americans need to stop worrying about when the next Lexus will be in the driveway or the next Explorer, Navigator, BMW, Benz, or other luxury item. They need to start worrying about the reversal of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement by martyrs such as Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, The three freedom riders murdered, Malcom X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Viola Luizzi, and others destroyed in the South due to trying to make the Constitution live up to its creed.

It puzzles me how someone can hate someone so deeply based on race. All throughout history and modern times, the importance and significance of the life of a Black man has always been one of a mitigating circumstance.