Did it, I wonder, really find all of them? All those responsible? The sheriff who locked two potential witnesses in jail on the day of the trial? The officials who packed the jury with white men from the poor side of town -men who actively hated Black people rather than simply looking down on them. The jury themselves who felt that life imprisonment or execution were too harsh a punishment for a white man who had 'only' killed a Black boy?

Roy Bryant and J W Milam were little more than dimwitted thugs, loathed by almost all who knew them. Sooner or later, they were going to kill, or be killed by, someone. Emmett Till was the victim (and perhaps not the first) of their insensate brutality, and thus became the reason their neighbours needed to finally shun them. Their subsequent lives and eventual deaths may seem condign, but are simply the inevitable consequences of who they were.

Carolyn Bryant Donham, like so many women of her place and era, was nothing. A human-shaped void where a person could have and should have been. What, if any, role she played in these grotesque events, was written for her by the men who surrounded her.

But the others, the knowing ones, the ones who shaped the consequences in a manner that ensured their continued dominance? Neither karma nor justice can touch them. They lived, or still live, their lives in comfort and wealth and undeserved respect.

To hang on to hate, or surrender it? To hold ones' rage, or let it go? Questions for each of us to square with our own conscience. I cannot know your rage, your fear, your pain, in my guts as you do. I know my own. I've faced fear in battle and came through. I've faced death and avoided him by a knifes' breadth. Now I have only anger and fear for those who have neither. Those to whom only power matters and who will twist the unthinking passions of others to their own ends. Them I will fight, until they come to the end they have so richly earned.