Shocking Story

Page 602.  The general argument made by William Bradford Huie in his work The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi is that blacks really were treated very unfair during the time of integration among races in public society.  More specifically, Huie argues that white people were not even worried about the consequences of hurting another human being because the law enforcement still didn’t care about different races.  He writes, “[Milam] was worried for the first time.  Somebody might see [them] and accuse [them] of stealing the fan” (p. 606).  In this passage, Huie is suggesting that the kidnappers weren’t even worried about the consequences of violating another human being’s rights, they were only worried about what people would think if they thought they had stolen a fan.  In conclusion, it is Huie’s belief that white people during this time were not held accountable for their actions and the heinous killing that was committed was completely accepted by the community in which they lived.

            In my view, Huie is right because there was never any public question about if those men had even had a reason for doing it or not and it was totally accepted by everyone in the white community.  For example, if those men would have done what they did to Emmitt to a white boy, they would have been sent to jail, but since it was too an out-of-town black boy, no one even had a second thought about it.  Although Huie might object that those men had a reason, I maintain that those men that killed him had justified their reason in their minds enough so that they would feel good enough about killing a young black boy.  Therefore, I conclude that even after integration, blacks were still not being treated fairly and that those men should have been sent to jail for what they had done.