Eyes on the Prize Reflection Ethan Mitzen

The video Eyes on the Prize deals with a great deal of civil rights history, the most moving and emphasized among them the murder of Emmett Till. This is probably one of the most moving parts of the video to most people because the act and aftermath were so terrible. The deed itself, the rationale of the perpetrators, and the verdict were all incredibly disgusting and an affront to the concepts of justice and fair trials. It calls to mind a much, much harsher version of the play Twelve Angry Men, which highlights the inherent bias juries held for a great deal of time. In the play, twelve white men sit on a jury to decide the fate of a young boy of a color, and only one juror seems to actually care about the fate of this young boy. Eventually, by actually reviewing the facts of the case, that juror is able to convince the other jurors to reverse their votes. In the instance of Emmett Till, the jury consisted entirely of white men, just as in the play, and they took only about an hour to decide that Emmett Till’s killers were not guilty. Some of the most moving parts of the video in this area, other than the clearly moving words of Emmett Till’s mother and the image of Emmett’s body, were the words of the judicial officials. The county sheriff used the N-word in a televised interview as if it was nothing (which I’m sure it was to him at that time) and the defence lawyer told the jury, which again consisted purely of white men, that he was certain that all good Anglo-Saxon men would acquit the men before then because of just that, their whiteness and the fact that the defendants had that in common with them. These words and phrases from authority figures are deeply concerning because they reveal the false promises of the American justice system in terms of race. When people in positions of power clearly have racial biases, faith in institutions is greatly diminished and even though this occurred decades ago the curtain that it pulled away is still incredibly telling in our modern justice system and the way it treats racially motivated crimes committed by white people.