Bobo was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago, visiting relatives in Mississippi.
Deciding to skip church on Sunday, Bobo, his cousin Curtis and a few other boys snuck off to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy some candy. Typical kids’ stuff.
But what followed most certainly was not. While in the store, the boy from Chicago allegedly made advances to the wife of the man who owned the store. When her husband heard about it, he became enraged. He aggressively questioned the black youth who came into his store until he learned where Bobo was staying.
Four days later, the store owner and some friends forcefully kidnapped Bobo from his great-uncle’s home. They beat him, shot him in the head, and then dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. The storeowner was arrested and tried for Bobo’s murder in September 1955, but the all-white jury found him not guilty. Knowing he could not be tried again after being cleared, the store owner, Roy Bryant, gave an interview to Look Magazine in 1956 confessing to killing Bobo, whose real name was Emmett Till.
In spite of his public confession, Bryant remained free until his death in 1994.
Stories of injustice like this understandably arouse strong emotions. We hate to see the guilty walk free and the victims of violence denied justice. It makes our stomachs churn.
But sadly the murder of Emmett Till was not the world’s first injustice. Injustice has been a problem since before the founding of human civilization. You could argue that injustice was one of the core problems that civilization intended to rectify.
And yet thousands of years later, it still endures.
Because injustice is such an emotional and universal theme, it often attracts the attention of storytellers. Classic novels like Crime and Punishment, Les Misérables, and To Kill a Mockingbird center their stories on instances of injustice.
Filmmakers also find injustice fertile ground. A recent example of the exploration of injustice in film is The Trial of the Chicago 7, recently released on Netflix. The film, written and directed by The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, tells the true story of seven men federally charged with inciting violence during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Injustice permeates the film from the first shot to the last. From the beginning, Sorkin makes it clear the prosecution of these men is entirely politically motivated. The recently elected Richard Nixon wants to punish left wing activists and use the justice system to do it. The film documents how the new administration used the Chicago riots of 1968 as an excuse to prosecute leftists from all walks of life. Two prominent hippy activists are charged along with two members of the more mainstream Students for a Democratic Society and a Black Panther as well, even though he’d only been in Chicago for four hours.
The judge assigned to the case, Julius Hoffman, is portrayed in the film as highly biased. Constantly citing attorneys and defendants alike with contempt for stepping outside of the lines of decorum, it is clear he made up his mind that the seven were guilty even before the opening statements were read. The federal prosecutors are not portrayed very sympathetically either, spending countless taxpayer dollars and months of court time for the sole purpose of punishing political enemies.
While the subject of the judicial railroading of these seven men is dark, Sorkin is able to inject moments of levity and even outright comedy at times. This keeps the mood of the film from getting to morose and makes such a dark tale more palatable and enjoyable for viewers.
Sorkin connects the plight of the Chicago Seven with the war in Vietnam which was ramping up during the time of the trial. It’s hard to miss the parallels between how the seven are treated by their government and how the young draftees are being treated, both bullied by government power. The film can make you very cynical about our leaders and our government.
But perhaps some of that cynicism is warranted, not because America is any worse than any other country, but rather because even in a country based on the lofty foundations of freedom and liberty, injustice persists. Reinhold Niebuhr once said, “The doctrine of original sin is the only empirically verifiable doctrine of the Christian faith.” I think he’s right. There’s an ingrained brokenness in us all that inevitably leads to exploitation, mangled bodies and unjust prison sentences. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is a reminder of the elusiveness nature of justice, even today.
But we do continue to make progress. Though it’s often frustratingly slow, society does bend towards justice. But if we are to continue down that road, we must remain vigilant. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
Charles D. Thomas is a writer and psychotherapist who made Three Rivers his home for over a decade. Feedback is welcome at [email protected].
Any views or opinions expressed in “Big World, Small Town” are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Watershed Voice staff or its board of directors.
