Of course some folks won't.
I have realized the South was a place full of bigotry so embedded in the way of life that a black person could be murdered, and a white defendant would walk into court and walk out acquitted and smiling. In Mississippi alone between 1882 when the data began to be collected and 1930, 500+ blacks were murdered by lynchings. Heaven knows how many more died before official data began to be collected.
This is what one of the scumbags that killed Emmet Till had to say, less than a year after the murder and his acquital and subsequent admission that he committed the murder with his co-defendant.
"Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand."
J. W. Milam, Look magazine, 1956
The irony was a grown man became enraged because a 14 year old black boy wasn't afraid of him
"In an interview with William Bradford Huie in Look magazine in 1956, Bryant and Milam stated that their intention was to beat Till and throw him off an embankment into the river to frighten him. They told Huie that while they were beating Till, however, he called them bastards, declared he was as good as they, and had in the past had sexual encounters with white women. They then put Till in the back of their truck, drove to a cotton gin to take a 70-pound (32 kg) fan—the only time they admitted to being worried, thinking that by this time in early daylight they would be spotted and accused of stealing—and drove for several miles along the river looking for a place to dispose of Till. They shot him by the river and weighted his body with the fan"
This event pondered noted novelist and Mississipian William Faulkner to ask
"If the facts as stated in the Look magazine account of the Till affair are correct, this remains: two adults, armed, in the dark, kidnap a fourteen-year-old boy and take him away to frighten him. Instead of which, the fourteen-year-old boy not only refuses to be frightened, but, unarmed, alone, in the dark, so frightens the two armed adults that they must destroy him.... What are we Mississippians afraid of?"
William Faulkner, "On Fear", 1956
All of this only half a century ago folks, less than the average lifespan today.
