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1. What point does the cartoon make?
2. Who do you think the man in the cartoon is talking to?

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1. What 3 symbols do you see in the cartoon?
2. What is the significance of the eagle’s saying that it wants his seat back?

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CLASS STARTER Class Starter What did the cartoonist,Thomas Nast, think about Jim Crow laws and how blacks were treated after the Civil War? The lives of blacks HAVE OR HAVE NOT improved since slavery ended. Explain your answer.

1. What groups of people are represented in the cartoon?

2. Complete the statements you see.
The Union as it ____________.
This is a _______________ man's government.
The ___________ cause.

3. Can you find each image in the cartoon. What do these symbols represent?
-Man hanging in tree
-Book & ABC’s
-Burning school house
-Pool of blood

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Class Starter "Black Brown White" a song by Big Bill Broonzy

1. What are your first reactions to this song?
2. When do you think it was written/performed?
3. What do you think it means
"If you was white, You's alright, If you was brown, Stick around?
But if you's black, oh, brother, Get back, get back, get back."?
4. What were Jim Crow laws?
5. Was Jim Crow a real person? Where does the name come from?
6. How does this song illustrate life in the Jim Crow South?
7. Read the list of Jim Crows in the previous post. Rewrite 2 from the list in "plain english"

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Big Bill Broonzy: Black, Brown and White

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Rosa Parks Thinglink

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Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a... by victoriaruss

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Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a... - ThingLink

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Class Starter Photo Analysis Topic "Little Rock Nine"

1. What are your observations about the photo?
2. What do you think Elizabeth was feeling at the moment the picture was taken?
3. Do you think the media coverage made integration easier or more challenging for the Little Rock Nine? Explain your viewpoint.

On the first day of integration at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, angry mobs protested outside the school. Eight of the Little Rock Nine, the African American students chosen to integrate the all-white Central High, met up beforehand so that they could have a security escort through the mob scene. One student, Elizabeth Eckford, did not receive the message about meeting beforehand. Unaware of the mob and the meeting, she went to school on her own. She was immediately surrounded by an angry crowd. She tried to enter the school several times but soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard prevented her from crossing their line and entering the building. She was forced to continue through the crowds. This famous photo was taken showing a brave Elizabeth Eckford and an angry Hazel Bryan (now Massery) behind her. A white woman from the crowd helped Elizabeth to a bus bench and onto a local bus.

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NPR interview

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It was 60 years ago this week that an all-white jury acquitted two white men in the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy visiting Mississippi from Chicago.

The case shocked the nation - drawing attention to the brutal treatment of African-Americans in the Deep South, and the failure of the justice system. The men later confessed to killing Till for whistling at a white woman.

Today, about 400 people live in Sumner, Miss., where the trial was held. The town sprouts up amid vast expanses of cotton land in the Mississippi Delta - the fertile northwest corner of the state.

Sumner's town square looks a lot like it did 60 years ago. A bank on the corner, law offices and small businesses surround the Tallahatchie County courthouse, its clock tower looming above pink crape myrtle blossoms.

Inside the courthouse, a dark wood stairwell leads to the second-floor courtroom, which is newly restored.

"Exactly the way it looked in 1955," says Patrick Weems, director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center here. He stands by the carved banister rail at the front of the courtroom. Twelve swiveling jury chairs to the left face the witness box.

"Mose Wright would have stood up here and given his testimony," Weems says. "The famous question was, they said, 'Do you know the men who murdered Emmett Till?' And he said, 'There they are.' "

It was a dramatic moment. Never in anyone's memory had a black man in Mississippi confronted whites in court.

Mose Wright was Emmett Till's great-uncle, who lived in the town of Money, 30 miles south of Sumner. Till was staying with him when the teenager made his fateful visit to Bryant's Grocery and spoke to Carol Bryant, the white woman at the counter.

Her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, later kidnapped Till from Wright's home in the middle of the night. The boy was beaten, shot in the head and dumped in the Tallahatchie River, weighted down by a cotton gin fan.

Till's mother held an open-casket funeral back in Chicago so the world could witness the disturbing images of her son's disfigured body. The resulting outrage drew unprecedented interest in the murder trial a month later.

"I had never seen anything like it," says Mississippi state Sen. David Jordan, a college student at the time. "So many people in town. So much news and so much fear."

Jordan and some classmates went to the trial, barely finding a seat in the sweltering and packed courtroom. They sat in the rear; the front seats were reserved for white people.

Sitting in the back row again as the anniversary approached, Jordan recalls being struck by the relaxed nature of the defendants. During one recess, he says, one of their wives brought the children to play at the defense table, along with bottles of Coca-Cola.

"Just going through a mockery - it was no justice or no seriousness as I could see on their faces," Jordan says, "because they all were laughing - even the jury were laughing."

After a five-day trial, Bryant and Milam were acquitted. Jordan thinks it was no coincidence that the verdict came a year after the Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregated public schools.

"The state was set at a point. [It] had been said over and over that 'before niggers could go to school with white children, blood will run in the streets,' " Jordan says. "This was evidence, in their mind I assume, that this is the example that the world can see that we mean business."

"Mississippi in 1955 was just impossible for a situation like this," says Betty Pearson, who was 33 years old at the time. Pearson, the wife of a white plantation owner, and state Sen. Jordan are among the last living people who attended the Emmett Till murder trial.

She says stores throughout the Mississippi Delta had set mason jars by their cash registers to raise money for the defense, and every lawyer in Sumner was representing Bryant and Milam.

It infuriated her.

"To me it said that, OK, every white person in Tallahatchie County - if not in all of Mississippi - is a racist. And they're trying to defend these people," Pearson says. "And I knew that was not true."

Pearson, now 93, says that after the trial she was stunned by the silence.

"I never got one question from a single soul in Sumner," she says. "Their reaction to it was, if we just ignore it, it'll go away."

The courthouse was remodeled in the 1970s, and up until about 10 years ago there was very little said about what transpired here.

In 2007, Pearson joined a local biracial group that apologized to Till's family. Another member of the group, the Rev. Willie Williams, says that in the years since, they've been working to restore the courthouse and foster reconciliation.

"Reconciliation is the bridge," Williams says. But he says there's still work to be done to restore trust.

Others believe the Till trial has been a stigma on Sumner that it didn't deserve; Till was murdered to the south in LeFlore County, but his body was discovered in Tallahatchie.

John Whitten III practices law in Sumner. His late father was chief counsel for the defense in 1955.

"We didn't do it. It didn't happen here," Whitten says. "This is something that was dragged in and left to rot in our courthouse."

Whitten says that what happened here 60 years ago should never be denied, but that it also should not be honored.

The state has created a historical trail to show how events, including the Till case, sparked the modern civil rights movement, and there's a marker here along the banks of the Tallahatchie where Till's body was pulled from the river.

But confronting a fraught history has been an ongoing struggle in Mississippi. Today, that marker is riddled with bullet holes.

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6 Decades Later, Acquittal Of Emmett Till's Killers Troubles Town

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It was 60 years ago this week that an all-white jury acquitted two white men in the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy visiting Mississippi from Chicago. The case shocked the nation - drawing attention to the brutal treatment of African-Americans in the Deep South, and the failure of the justice system.

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Worksheet