1900s Race Riots

1896 Words8 Pages

Jarred Jones Ransom
Mr. Dennis
College Comp II
2 May 2017

The 1900s Race Riots and Mediocrity of Fair Trial: A Look into Racial Tension and the Judiciary System during the 1900s In the documentary “The People v. Leo Frank” tells the story of a murder case in Atlanta Georgia. Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old from Georgia, left home on the morning of April 26 to pick up her wages at the pencil factory and view the Confederate Day Parade. She never returned home. The next day, the factory night watchman found her sawdust-covered body in the factory basement. When Frank, who had just completed a term as president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith, was asked to view the body, he became agitated, confirmed personally paying Mary tier wages, …show more content…

Detailing that labor shortage, the great migration, and racial strife leads to the race riots of 1919. With labor shortages, industrial cities in the North and Midwest profited greatly from World War I. Also encountering serious labor shortages because white men were enlisting in World War I and the halted immigration from Europe. To fulfill these job shortages, at least 500,000 African-Americans moved from the South to Northern and Midwestern cities. Leaving the South to escape Jim Crow laws, segregated schools, and lack of job opportunities. Working class white workers in Northern and Midwestern cities who resented the presence of African Americans were now competing for jobs.
In another documentary called “The Untold Story of Emmett Till” gives an example of another case with just prosecution and conviction. Emmett Till grew up in a middle-class black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. Till's great uncle came up from Mississippi to visit the family in Chicago. Wright was planning to take Till's cousin back to Mississippi with him to visit relatives down South. Till, learned of these plans and begged his mother to let him go along. Eventually, Till persuaded his mother to let him …show more content…

Till then purchased bubble gum, and later he was accused of either whistling at, flirting with or touching the hand of the store's white female clerk and wife of the owner Carolyn Bryant.
Four days later, Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from Moses Wright's home. They then beat Till brutally, dragged him to Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and shoved his mutilated body into the water. Later Moses Wright then reported Till's disappearance to the local authorities and three days later his corpse was found and pulled out of the river. Till's face was mutilated and Wright only managed to positively identify him by the ring on his finger, engraved with his father's initials.
Till's body was later shipped to Chicago, where his mother had an open-casket funeral with Till's body on display for five days. Thousands of people came to the funeral the brutal hate crime. Till's mother wanted an open casket so that the world could see what had happened to her baby boy. No one was ever convicted of this hate

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