"He came in our store and put his hands on me with no provocation. Do I think he should have been killed for doing that? Absolutely, unequivocally, no!"

Wrote Carolyn Bryant Donham, in an unpublished memoir, quoted in "Carolyn Bryant Donham Dies at 88; Her Words Doomed Emmett Till/She accused Emmett, 14, of accosting her, and her testimony led to the acquittals of her husband and his half brother in a murder that helped galvanize the civil rights movement" (NYT).

The unpublished memoir — "More Than a Wolf Whistle: The Story of Carolyn Bryant Donham" — came to light after Duke University historian Timothy B. Tyson published "The Blood of Emmett Till" in 2017. Tyson had interviewed her, and he said "She said with respect to the physical assault on her, or anything menacing or sexual, that that part isn’t true." 

At the trial of her husband and half brother, she testified that Till “put his left hand on my waist, and he put his other hand over on the other side" and that he said "What’s the matter, baby? Can’t you take it?"

"A grand jury in Mississippi has declined to indict the white woman whose accusation set off the lynching of Black teenager Emmett Till nearly 70 years ago..."

"... After hearing more than seven hours of testimony from investigators and witnesses, a Leflore County grand jury last week determined there was insufficient evidence to indict Carolyn Bryant Donham on charges of kidnapping and manslaughter.... In an unpublished memoir obtained last month by The Associated Press, Donham said she was unaware of what would happen to the 14-year-old Till, who lived in Chicago and was visiting relatives in Mississippi when he was abducted, killed and tossed in a river. She accused him of making lewd comments and grabbing her while she worked alone at a family store in Money, Mississippi. Donham said in the manuscript that the men brought Till to her in the middle of the night for identification but that she tried to help the youth by denying it was him. Despite being abducted at gunpoint from a family home by Roy Bryant and Milam, the 14-year-old identified himself to the men, she claimed."

AP reports.

The incident occurred in 1955, when Donham was 21. She is now 87 (88?).

Did the memoir say that she lied or was the grand jury asked to infer that she lied? If it was the latter, what was the basis of the inference? Was it that, considering what happened to him, he would have known not to do what she said he did? There seems to have been another book that says she admitted to lying.

"This bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise of abrasion."

Here's the transcript.

I seek to amend this legislation, not because I take it or I take lynching lightly, but because I take it seriously, and this legislation does not. Lynching is a tool of terror that claimed the lives of nearly 5,000 Americans between 1881 and 1968. But this bill would cheapen the meaning of lynching by defining it so broadly as to include a minor bruise or abrasion. Our nation’s history of racial terrorism demands more seriousness from us than that.... It would be a disgrace for the Congress of the United States to declare that a bruise is lynching, that an abrasion is lynching, that any injury to the body, no matter how temporary, is on par with the atrocities done to people like Emmett Till, Raymond Gunn, and Sam Hose, who were killed for no reason, but because they were black. To do that would demean their memory and cheapen the historic and horrific legacy of lynching in our country.... We have had federal hate crime statutes for over 50 years, and it has been a federal hate crime to murder someone because of their race for over a decade. Additionally, murder is already a crime in 50 states. In fact, rather than consider a good-intentioned but symbolic bill, the Senate could immediately consider addressing qualified immunity and ending police militarization. We can and must do better....

At the link — the heated response from Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. Harris accuses Paul of having "no reason... other than cruel and deliberate obstruction on a day of mourning." Booker praises Rand Paul — doesn't "question his heart" — but stresses what it "would mean for America" to pass the bill right now instead of getting hung up on "legalistic issues."

"The anger and action aimed at the statues are reminiscent of recent controversies over two prominent artworks..."

"... Dana Schutz’s painting 'Open Casket' depicting Emmett Till, the murdered African-American teenager, in the Whitney Biennial, and Sam Durant’s sculpture gallows 'Scaffold,' at the Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden, which was denounced by Native American groups for recalling an act of genocide. Protesters objected to both pieces on racial, ethnic, and historical grounds and called for their removal or destruction. Neither work celebrated the Confederacy or slavery, however, and both were created as art rather than as public memorials like some of the statues now being removed."

Created as art? What does that even mean? They were political and intentionally so.

The passage is from "Trump Aside, Artists and Preservationists Debate the Rush to Topple Statues" (NYT).

Both "Open Casket" and "Scaffold" were discussed on the blog. Here:

But why would the Whitney choose ["Open Casket"] for its vaunted biennial? You could say that the Whitney should want art that challenges us, but this is simply bad. The historical photograph speaks for itself. What did Schutz contribute with her simplified and smeared paint job?

And here:

What were the mental processes of the elite arts people who decided this was a good idea? Now, they have to backtrack, because their mistake was so bad and they want to salvage their reputation. They're dismantling the thing they should never have put up. That's not censorship. That's belated shame.

Also from the NYT article:

[Some] argue that removing a statue from its place of origin diminishes the power of its historical significance. “The meanings and the history that we are able to draw from them in a different site, especially a sort of sanitized site like a museum, are not going to be the same,” said Michele H. Bogart, a professor at Stony Brook University. “That is a historical loss.”

This is an important point: Don't sanitize the history. Some people say the history remains the same when the statue is taken down. They're probably thinking of the history of the Civil War. But there's also the history of putting up monuments.

The statues were put up by white people who wanted to express something, and they are now being taken down because white people are ashamed of what they expressed back then. They want to delete the old evidence and use the deletion as the creation of new evidence — evidence of how kindly white people really are. Why should white people have such an easy time covering up their shame? Removing the statues can be portrayed as a kindness toward black people, but critical race theory teaches us to presume that what white people do they do for themselves.

"That even the disfigured corpse of a child was not sufficient to move the white gaze from its habitual cold calculation is evident daily and in a myriad of ways..."

"... not least the fact that this painting exists at all."

From the petition to remove the painting of Emmett Till from the 2017 Whitney Biennial.

There's also the tweet that says that the artist — a white woman, Dana Schutz — "should have read Saidiya Hartman before she turned Emmett Till into a bad Francis Bacon painting."

That's quoted here, at the NYT. You can see the painting at both links. The "bad Francis Bacon painting" description is apt (and would be funny if it were not the case that nothing about Emmett Till is funny). Here's what Francis Bacon paintings look like (in case you don't know). And here's a Wikipedia page for Saidya Hartman.

Why did the Whitney include this painting? They're in a position to be awfully choosy, so why pick this?

Schutz is certainly free to make bad paintings in bad taste. She can also use words to speak freely defending herself with dumb banality:

“I don’t know what it is like to be black in America but I do know what it is like to be a mother. Emmett was Mamie Till’s only son. The thought of anything happening to your child is beyond comprehension. Their pain is your pain. My engagement with this image was through empathy with his mother.... Art can be a space for empathy, a vehicle for connection. I don’t believe that people can ever really know what it is like to be someone else (I will never know the fear that black parents may have) but neither are we all completely unknowable.”

But why would the Whitney choose this for its vaunted biennial? You could say that the Whitney should want art that challenges us, but this is simply bad. The historical photograph speaks for itself. What did Schutz contribute with her simplified and smeared paint job?

Unless you view the painting as step 1 in a performance art project that includes the protests, it's just bad.

"Lil Wayne Puts Mountain Dew in Crisis Mode."

"How much street cred is too much?"

The family [of 1955 murder victim Emmett Till] was not satisfied with [Lil Wayne's acknowledgement of the offense they took at his lyric likening Till's murder to sexual enthusiasm] and instead called for a meeting with executives at PepsiCo. At the same time, a publicist for the family said, they found an additional way to pressure Mountain Dew: to bring to public attention an offensive Mountain Dew video ad created by the hip-hop producer and rap artist known as Tyler, the Creator, that featured a battered white waitress, bandaged and on crutches, trying to identify her assailant from a lineup that included African-American men and a goat.

What niche of meaning does each particular soda occupy? The Mountain Dew brand was always transgressive:

"Mountain Dew" was originally Southern and/or Scots/Irish slang for moonshine (i.e., homemade whiskey).... Using it as the name for the soda was originally suggested by Carl E. Retzke at an Owens-Illinois Inc meeting in Toledo, Ohio, and was first trademarked by Ally and Barney Hartman in the 1940s. Early bottles and signage carried the reference forward by showing a cartoon-stylized mountaineer. 

Mountaineer? That's Wikipedia text. I guess someone edited "hillbilly," trying to get to something more decorous. To my ear, a "mountaineer" is "A person who engages in or is skilled at mountain climbing" — and that is the 5th definition in the (unlinkable) Oxford English Dictionary. I'm surprised to see the first definition is: "A person who is native to or lives in a mountainous region; (occas.) such a person regarded as ignorant, uncivilized, or uneducated; (U.S.) a hillbilly." This usage goes back to Shakespeare:

a1616   Shakespeare Cymbeline (1623) iv. ii. 102   Yeeld, Rusticke Mountaineer.
a1616   Shakespeare Tempest (1623) iii. iii. 44   When wee were Boyes Who would beleeue that there were Mountayneeres, Dew-lapt [etc.].

The word "hillbilly" — "A person from a remote rural or mountainous area, esp. of the south-eastern U.S." — is only traced back to 1900:

1900   N.Y. Jrnl. 23 Apr. 2/5   In short, a Hill-Billie is a free and untrammelled white citizen of Alabama, who lives in the hills, has no means to speak of, dresses as he can, talks as he pleases, drinks whiskey when he gets it, and fires off his revolver as the fancy takes him.

Has anyone ever before written a blog post that went from Lil Wayne to Shakespeare so quickly? I don't know, but I'm interested in how the product's branding evolved from low-class white to low-class black. But the branding has always been low-class. How do you do that well and remain current when there are high-minded groups getting press, demanding apologies, stirring up outrage?

IN THE COMMENTS: richlb said:

...poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed...

All right, then. That settles it.

"I would like to take a moment to acknowledge your hurt, as well as the letter you sent to me via your attorneys."

"As a father myself, I cannot imagine the pain that your family has had to endure," writes Lil Wayne to the family of 1955 murder victim Emmett Till, whose attorneys corresponded with him over his lyric "Beat that p***y up like Emmett Till." The linked article stresses that Lil Wayne did not, technically, apologize. I'm drawn to the words "the letter you sent to me via your attorneys" and just guess that any standoffishness has to do with the use of lawyers as the way to start a conversation with somebody.