The media calls them protesters, I call them a mob

So you would support this group killing Bryant, but what if they identified the wrong woman thinking she was Bryant and killed her instead? Would you still support that because their intent was righteous, or would you now condemn the group? If they accidentally killed the wrong woman, would you support her family and loved ones exacting deadly revenge on this group?

The problem with revenge killings is it becomes tit for tat that goes on ad infinitum, and you get what we have in the Middle East.

 

I would not support them killing an innocent woman.

 

We sure do. MAGA poster gets off on constantly defending police who brutalize black people, defends old white ladies whose nefarious actions leads to the maiming and killing of a black boy, defends the mob who burned down a black town in Tulsa etc. We definitely knows where he stands.

 

I’m glad to hear that there are some limits to your vengeance.

The problem with vigilante justice is who gets to decide that the actions are just. You can decide that that group would be justified in killing Bryant in her nursing home room, but I imagine that Bryant‘s husband and his half brother felt justified in killing Emmett Till. We could say they would be wrong in thinking that, but then how could we turn around and say that this mob would be right.

This is why we have a legal system, flawed as it may be. If we leave justice up to everyone doing what is right in their own eyes, we will have chaos and needless deaths.

A great movie showing how vigilante justice can go horribly wrong is The Ox-Bow Incident, a 1942 movie starring Henry Fonda, Harry Morgan, and a bunch of other Hollywood greats.

 

That same problem exists within the law. We're all free people and get to decide what we feel is and isn't just. There might be consequences for pursuing justice, and we get to decide whether we accept them. How can I say they were wrong and this group isn't? Simple, I make my own decisions based on my moral code.

The Nazis said it was legal to exterminate Jews. Do you think the Jews who resisted were in the wrong? Do you think the other people who resisted the Nazis and helped the Jews escape were in the wrong? I don't. So all this talk of not disobeying the law when it stands in the way of justice rings hollow to me. I fight for justice, not order.

The legal system let Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant, and J.W. Milam walk. It let numerous other white people who murdered Black people around that time walk. The legal system was a tool of oppression for segregationists to use against Black people. Black people dismantled de jure segregation by disobeying the law.

We progressed as a nation because people forsook what the legal system's idea of justice was and fought for their idea of justice. So telling people to rely on the legal system will ring hollow to many. The legal system often fails to deliver justice. It is a system that favors order and protecting the powerful and the advantaged. I won't condemn people for pursuing justice when the legal system and our laws won't deliver it.

 

You seem to be saying that civil disobedience such as refusing to give up your seat on the bus is in the same category as murdering people. I don’t see those as equivalent. Civil disobedience can be good, but murdering is never good.

And none of this is equivalent to fighting a war against the Nazis.

 

I'm saying that the law often isn't just, and sometimes, people have to take justice into their own hands. Even "murdering" can be good and just. I've offered an example in this thread where murdering Nazi war criminals was both good and just.

Additionally, the resistance in the countries controlled by Nazi Germay were breaking the law in fighting and killing Nazis. You can handwave that away, but you can't say they weren't doing the right and just thing. You're simply picking and choosing when we should follow the law, which is fine because that's my very point.

 

It is comical that a poster like you or me has to explain this to a…lawyer.

 

Perhaps you didn’t understand what I was saying. First of all, please do not think I am in any way justifying what they did. I am not. What they did was a heinous, horrific crime and they deserved the death penalty for it.

What do you think was going through their minds when they committed the crime? Do you think they sat around saying, “We are hideous racist people, and so let’s go out and do this horrific act of violence against this poor innocent kid. Because that’s what we do — we are racist people.“ Do you think that’s what they said? Do you think in their warped minds they thought it was somehow justified?

 

You need to stop this right now. It doesn’t fit the narrative. How can we feel a sense of righteousness about executing an 88 year old senile lady, in a nursing home, when you present offensive facts like this? Your presentation of such facts proves you must be a racist.

 

A person with more self awareness would wonder why somebody with so much experience dealing with our legal systems would feel so skeptical about their ability to deliver justice.

 

Yessss!!!! / Jan-6th-MAGATARDS.

 

Don’t you dare accuse me of handwaving away fighting the Nazis. My dad piloted 35 bomber missions over Nazi territory. His brother, also a pilot, gave his life fighting the Nazis. So don’t pull this self-righteous, high horse stuff on me.

 

Facts? They're relying in part on Bryant's own claims (which are contradicted by her original claim that she did tell her husband), despite her admitting to having lied multiple times. If you had bothered to check the source cited in support, you'd know that.
Could lies about Emmett Till lead to prosecution?
After the FBI's reopening of the case in 2004, she spoke to an FBI agent. (She had divorced Roy Bryant and remarried, carrying the last name Donham.) She repeated the story about Till she had previously testified to, telling the agent that “as soon as he touched me, I started screaming.”

She told the FBI that she didn’t tell her husband, Roy, about what happened because she was worried he would beat Till up. She said she also asked Milam not to tell her husband, J.W., “because I didn’t intend to tell Roy, because I was afraid of what they would do.”

But when the FBI questioned Juanita Milam, she revealed that she wasn’t at the store as Carolyn Bryant had claimed and that she “would not have been babysittin’ for her.”

Notes obtained by The Clarion-Ledger reveal that Carolyn Bryant gave a different story when she first spoke to defense lawyers in 1955, saying Till “insulted” her, but mentioned nothing about touching her. Tim Tyson, author of the new book, “The Blood of Emmett Till,” said Monday that she told him her testimony about a physical assault by Till was "not true."
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The mental gymnastics you'll do to try and exonerate Carolyn Bryant are truly impressive. Before you align yourself with 51, I highly recommend you speak with some of the posters on this forum you like far more than me. They'll tell you about his posting history here.

What we know for a fact is that there's an open warrant for her for Till's kidnapping and she's accused of being the person who confirmed it was him when Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam snatched him from his home.
Unserved Arrest Warrant For ‘Mrs. Roy Bryant’ in Till Case Uncovered in Leflore County

 

Stop deflecting. I'm not talking about Americans fighting the Nazis. I'm talking about the people in Germany and other occupied countries breaking the law to resist their Nazi governments. You don't want to address that point because it undermines the argument you're trying to make.

 

You think this group going into a nursing home and murdering a woman who is accused of a crime but not convicted would be equivalent to the Jews resisting their annihilation at the hands of the Nazis. I do not see the equivalence. We’ll just have to disagree on that.

 

I think the only reason this woman and her scumbag husband never saw the inside of a prison is because the racist white segregationists in Mississippi made damn sure of it. In that vein, Black people were denied justice, just like Jewish people were denied justice when Nazi war criminals escaped and fled overseas. I don't condemn Jewish people hunting down those Nazi war criminals and executing them.

But my point in response to yours was a greater one than just this situation. You took the stance that we need to rely on the legal system to provide justice and shouldn't seek it out ourselves. I disagreed and offered you many historic examples to demonstrate that people are not always in the wrong to seek justice out themselves, even if they break the law in doing so.