No savior for Emmett Till, but justice possible for this woman
It took a lot of courage for Carmen Williams to reveal the identity of her 20-year-old daughter. Williams is the mother of Megan Williams, the black West Virginia woman who was tortured, stabbed, sexually assaulted and treated like an animal by six white offenders during a weeklong captivity. You never get used to the lurid details of a man's inhumanity. Just as it was hard to bear the horrible things that were done to Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom, the white Knoxville, Tenn., couple brutally killed in January, I'm sickened by the cruelty Megan Williams suffered. I'm also struck by the similarity between how Carmen Williams chose to handle her daughter's ordeal at the hands of whites and how Mamie Till-Mobley handled the brutal murder of her son, Emmett Till, in 1955. More HERE
Source: Tom Breen and Shaya Tayefe Mohajer
Hat Tip: Associated Press Writers and the Logan Banner
Racism in the coalfields?
Claude Williams, 70, stands outside of the Logan County Courthouse where he works as a security guard Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2007 in Logan, W.Va. Ever since news broke of a black girl's alleged torture, rape and humiliation at the hands of six white captors in Logan County, whites keep approaching Williams, a Logan native, apologizing, and expressing an assumed shame. AP Photo/Jeff Gentner
LOGAN, W.Va. (AP) - Ever since police arrested six whites in the rape and torture of a black woman, Claude Williams has been accepting apologies.
Williams, a black security guard at the courthouse where the case is unfolding, said whites continually approach him to express shame for the allegations.
Williams is not related to the victim, Megan Williams, but feels a kinship with her. He descended from coal miners who came to work in West Virginia from Alabama, where "you'd be a 50-year-old black man and a 10-year-old white boy would be called 'sir,' and he'd call you 'boy.'"
Authorities have not filed hate crime charges in the attack, but for many residents, the issue of race is inseparable from the assault on Megan Williams, who said she was doused with hot water, forced to eat animal feces, and taunted with racial slurs.
The graphic allegations have reverberated across West Virginia, where 97 percent of the state's 1.8 million residents are white. But many locals bristle at the shadow the case has cast across their communities.
"It's not a West Virginia problem," said the Rev. Emanuel Heyliger of the Ferguson Memorial Baptist Church in Dunbar, a friend of Megan Williams' family. "This could happen anywhere in the United States where men's minds are blighted by evil."
West Virginia's relationship with race is older than the state. It broke away from Virginia in 1861 rather than join the Confederacy. But that move was not a straightforward renunciation of slavery, which was still legal in West Virginia when the state joined the Union in 1863. Gov. Arthur Boreman abolished it two years later.
West Virginia's legal system enforced racial segregation until the start of the 1960s. Laws were passed to ban interracial marriage and the education of black children together with whites. There was even a law requiring birth, death and marriage records for blacks to be kept in separate registers.
But unlike some states, West Virginia's government took an active role in building an alternate society of black institutions. The first publicly funded black school below the Mason-Dixon line was founded in 1866 in West Virginia, and by the start of World War II, the state also had two public colleges, a hospital for the mentally ill, vocational training schools, an orphanage and a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients.
"To tell you the truth, black people were able to do things here they weren't always able to do in other places, particularly the deep South," said Cicero Fain, an assistant history professor at Marshall University.
"But blacks were always aware they were supposed to be second-class citizens," he said. "The state funded these institutions, assisted in establishing them, but never tried to integrate them into the prevailing white power structure."
Former state NAACP President James Tolbert says the state's blacks have long struggled for adequate attention.