This was a 14 year old boy visiting his southern cousins and it was obvious from the interviews with his family that he didn’t know the “rules of conduct” for “keeping your place” in the South of the 1950s. Whether or not he whistled at a “white woman” is irrelevant, any society that believes torture and murder is the proper punishment for a whistle deserves to be condemned. And if it’s “sexual harrassment”, then over half of the male population of this country would either be in jail or dead.

If nothing else, the Till case can emphasize just exactly what constitutes a miscarriage of justice and that alone is enough to include him in Black History Month.

Read enough to be sick..we are surrounded, circle the wagons and listen carefully because the enemy is stealthy, slick and comes at you from seeming nowhere, armed with money, lies as truth, and an agenda that does not include us except as dupes, and clueless victims. This is frightening stuff, sneaking sideways through the front door.

sagesource @
114

I am having trouble imagining a middle position that has Till guilty of enough wrong to justify his being tortured to death, or the trivialization of such a fate….

There is a distinction between being a victim and being a martyr.

http://www.watch.pair.com/charter.html

The problem is, that by legitimizing charter schools, even if yours is “progressive,” you are not only enabling for-profit education in this country, you are in effect saying that it’s ok if the children of wingnuts grow up to be wingnut educated, because your child will be [insert worldview here] educated, thereby preserving an opposition that you are familiar with. I can’t think of a better recipe for entrenched factionalism. Further, from what I’ve observed, the charter schools that are supposedly saving the inner city are crossing boundaries that I am very uncomfortable with in their partnering with corporations. It might look like responsible community developmment if, say, UPS endows a south Chicago charter and offers its graduates internship and employment opportunites straight out of school; but what’s to prevent the schools from adjusting their curricular goals in order to serve their benefactors and make their students “better employees.” I’m not against employment, but I am against interfering with a child’s potential by tailoring their education to meet the needs of a service sector economy. Public education has a duty to cultivate excellent citizens. Charter schools have a duty to their shareholders, their corporate benefactors, and ideologues.

I dated a woman who was a grant writer for just such a school in just such a city, and would tell me all about the business side of things. She finally quit after uncovering the unbelievable depth of corporate interest and rightwing front company activity going on within the movement. I think the last straw was a link she discovered between Edison Schools, the Hoover Institute, and Pentagon planners. A quick search just now gave me this lovely piece of research:

http://www.watch.pair.com/charter10.html

Think there’s no connection between the privatization of the military and the privatization of k-12? Some kids are just born soldiers, I guess.

We have a failure of logic here. You are claiming that there are only two possibilities: (1)Till is a saintly role model who could have done no wrong or (2)Till deserved to be brutally murdered. If you don’t hold this view, then the school’s action is not unreasonable.

I am having trouble imagining a middle position that has Till guilty of enough wrong to justify his being tortured to death, or the trivialization of such a fate….

You would be wrong. Charter schools have been a miserable failure. Just another scam for the eternally gullible American public.

My son was in kindergarten and first grade when his brother served in Iraq.

Sorry, I think he was old enough to understand what was happening, what was going to happen; he asked questions of a depth and nature I couldn’t have predicted. If the school needed to make any concession to younger children and their parents it would be to talk about concerns in advance of the presentation.