Thread by @Stonekettle

In the early morning hours of August 28, 1955, 14-year-old African-American Emmett Till was dragged from his great uncle's house near Money, Mississippi, by two white men. He was bound and gagged thrown into the back of a pickup truck and driven to a nearby barn.

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Till was pistol-whipped into unconsciousness, tortured, and beaten so severely that when his body was found, he could only be identified by a ring on his finger. He was shot, a 70lb fan blade tied around his neck, and his body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River.

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His "crime?"

Till was alleged to have whistled at a white woman -- a charge she later admitted that she made up.

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Till's murderers? Despite numerous witnesses and overwhelming evidence, they were acquitted of the crime. And because in 1955 there were no FEDERAL hate crime laws and because they couldn't be tried again on the same charge, they publicly ADMITTED to the murder. Gleefully.

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As noted above, Till was brutalized so badly his body and particularly his face were unrecognizable. His mother chose to have an open casket funeral and forced America to look upon the face of racial violence in America.

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That courageous act -- something that must have been horrifying for her -- galvanized the Civil Rights movement and brought home the horrors of Jim Crow to many white Americans -- not enough, not yet, but it was a start.

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Neither of the men responsible, who publicly ADMITTED they were responsible, were ever held to account -- though they were eventually ostracised by the local community.

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Both the murderers eventually died of cancer after miserable lives of crime and ruin. But the man most directly responsible for Till's murder claimed in an interview years later that Till ruined HIS life and he showed no remorse whatsoever.

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There are a number of memorial markers to Till in the Mississippi Delta. To this very day, White Supremacists routinely seek out those markers and vandalize them in a show of defiant solidarity with the brutal racists who murdered an innocent child in cold blood.

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THAT is what lynching is.

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And Emmett Till was hardly the only one. Between 1877 and 1950 more than 4000 African-Americans were lynched in this country. And thousands more Asian and Latinos.

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And so here we are today, in the shadow of those bodies and Donald Trump declares himself a victim and covers himself in the blood of 500 years of horror and misery and hate.

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All of America should be ashamed of this President -- a wealthy white man at the very pinnacle of power who himself once attempted to have five black teenagers executed for the alleged crime of assaulting a white woman.

That's right. You haven't forgotten, have you?

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After THIRTEEN years in prison, those teenagers, those young men of color, known as the Central Park 5, were conclusively exonerated by DNA evidence and the true rapist was caught and confessed to the crime.

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To this day, Donald Trump STILL claims that those black men are guilty and should have been executed. He has never shown a single shred of remorse for his false accusations.

THAT is what lynching is.

The only difference is that Trump's victims didn't end up in the river.

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We all should be outraged at Trump's pathetic and disgusting attempt to equate the legal and Constitutional consequences of his own greed, his racism, his terrible leadership, and his crass behavior to the genocidal horror of lynching.

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Any decent human being who has even the slightest awareness of the absolute horror of Jim Crow and America's history of racial violence, who has ever stood in front of Emmett Till's memorial in the Mississippi Delta, should be ashamed of this president.

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Trump's endless attempts to hijack the pain and suffering and history of others to his own self-aggrandizement is a blight -- yet another blight -- on our very history as a people and as a nation.

And history will one day hold us to account.

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