White Mothers Killing Babies and Blaming Black Men

Updated on Aug. 5, 2022 at v:00 p.m. ET: On July thirty, Shelby County District Chaser Amy Weirich announced that her function is opposing DNA testing of evidence in Pervis Payne's case. Weirich also said that evidence presented to Payne's legal squad in 2022 — previously referred to in this commodity as "hidden evidence" — is actually from another instance and was shown to Payne's team in error. This article has been updated to reflect this new information.

Emmett Till, a young Black boy in Mississippi, turned fourteen on July 25, 1955. Almost exactly one month later, he was brutally murdered after being accused of sexually harassing Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, in a grocery store.

Till would have turned 79 today had he not been killed. The two white men accused of his murder were afterwards found "not guilty" by an all-white, all-male person jury. Iv months after the trial, which took identify in a segregated courtroom, the 2 men admitted to kidnapping and murdering Till in an interview with Look magazine. Because they had already been acquitted, they could not be tried once more. Neither ever served time for Till's expiry.

Six decades later, Bryant admitted that she had lied and that the parts of her accusation considered nearly incendiary at the time — that Till had grabbed her and made verbal and physical advances on her — were untrue. Bryant has never faced whatever legal consequences for her accusations against Till. The FBI opened a reinvestigation into his murder three years ago.

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Till'due south story of injustice might have been lost to history if his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, hadn't insisted that the world take detect of her son. When Till's body was found in the Tallahatchie River days after the teen had been abducted from his bang-up uncle's house, information technology was unrecognizable. His great uncle was only able to place his trunk — disfigured from being beaten, shredded with barbed wire, shot, and thrown in the river — past his male parent'due south initialed ring, which he still had on his finger.

"Let the people see what they did to my male child," Till-Mobley said when she saw her son's body. She insisted on an open casket for his funeral so that the public would accept to fence with the heinous offense carried out confronting her son and and then many other Blackness Americans throughout history.

Related: Read Mamie Till-Mobley's book "The Death of Innocence"

More than four,700 people were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968, according to the NAACP. The vast majority were Blackness, while many of the white victims of lynching were killed for helping Black people, advocating for their rights, or for speaking up against the lynching of Black people.

Though Till's story has not been forgotten, such racism and inequality persist today and contribute to injustice in the legal system and beyond. From the Scottsoboro Boys, who were wrongly convicted of raping two white women, to the "Exonerated V" to Christopher Cooper, the man a white adult female falsely told police force had threatened her life in May, Black and brownish men in America have continued to be perceived every bit dangerous, violent, and hypersexual. The harmful and racist stereotypes of Black men as predators has contributed to Black men being incarcerated at higher rates and to wrongful conviction.

"Let the people see what they did to my boy."

These are the same kind of racist stereotypes that the prosecution in Pervis Payne's case evoked at trial to convict him of murder. Payne, who has an intellectual disability, has spent 32 years facing execution in Tennessee for a law-breaking he has always said he did not commit — and DNA testing of testify in his case could help prove this. The Innocence Projection jointly filed a petition for DNA testing on July 22.

Pervis Payne (second from correct) with his family. (Photo: Courtesy of the Payne family).

Payne was bedevilled for the 1987 murder of Charisse Christopher and her child in Millington, Tennessee. The prosecution argued that Payne had been searching for sex after using drugs and looking at a Playboy magazine, and that he attacked Christopher after he made an advance on her and she rejected him. Merely no evidence supports this theory.

Though Payne'due south mother begged law enforcement to administrate a drug test to her son to bear witness that he had not been using drugs, they refused. Payne had no history of drug utilize, no criminal record, and was non known to be trigger-happy. In fact, those who know him describe him every bit a kind and respectful man, who liked to make his family express joy and help out at his male parent'due south church building.

Read more: eight Things You Demand to Know About Pervis Payne's Instance

But the prosecution painted a very different film, making Payne out to exist a fierce and hypersexual drug user. And, at trial, the prosecutor repeatedly pointed out the victim'due south "white skin" when referring to parts of her body, a poignant reminder of her whiteness in a county ranked among the 25 counties with the almost recorded lynchings between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative.

Send Pervis a note to tell him that you lot'll be fighting for him.

In the belatedly 1800s, claims that Blackness men had raped or fabricated sexual advances on white women were frequently cited to justify their lynchings. Historians say that in reality many rape accusation claims were false and were oft used as embrace for consensual relationships that were, at the time, extremely taboo. And racist beliefs were and so deep-seated among white communities, that "Whites could non countenance the idea of a white woman desiring sexual activity with a [Black person], thus whatsoever physical relationship betwixt a white woman and a [B]lack man had, past definition, to exist an unwanted attack," writes historian Philip Dray.

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The perception of Black men every bit a danger to white women in item, contributing to false accusations like the ones lobbied against Till and the Scottsboro Boys, is deeply rooted in this history and the legacy of slavery. In Louisiana, for instance, rape was just considered a crime when the victim was a white woman, co-ordinate to the American Bar Association, and death penalty was a mandatory punishment for rape and attempted rape only when the alleged attacker was a slave (and Blackness).

Payne had no history of drug utilise, no criminal tape, and was non known to be trigger-happy.

In Alabama , the court immune juries to consider a defendant's race and to rely on social stereotypes about that race — similar the prevalent belief at the time that Blackness men are prone to raping women — to infer the accused'south intent to commit a criminal offence.

Today, Blackness men are twice every bit likely to exist arrested for a sexual activity offense and three times more likely to be accused of rape than white men, the Appeal reported. That'south not because they are committing such crimes at higher rates than people of other races or ethnicities, just because they are more frequently suspected and defendant of such crimes due to racial biases.

Pervis Payne in Riverbend Maximum Security establishment in Tennessee. (Photograph: Courtesy of PervisPayne.Org).

All too often, Black men are presumed guilty by law enforcement and the public, contributing to wrongful convictions and harsher sentences when plant guilty. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, innocent Black people are 7 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted of murder than innocent white people. And studies show that Black men are sentenced to death far more often when defendant of committing a crime confronting a white person. Since 1976, well-nigh 300 Blackness people accused of murdering white people have been executed — about 14 times the number of white people executed for murdering white people, the Death penalty Information Center reported.

Payne, a Black man, is scheduled to be executed on Dec. 3, for the murder of Christopher, a white woman. But DNA testing that could be completed inside 60 days, could prove what he's been saying for three decades: He'south innocent.

His life, similar Till'due south, should not be unjustly taken.

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Source: https://innocenceproject.org/emmett-till-birthday-pervis-payne-innocent-black-men-slavery-racism/