On June 16th, 1944 George Stinney Jr, a fourteen year old African American boy was executed by electrocution for allegedly murdering and attempting to rape two young white girls. George’s tragedy is set in motion when one afternoon on his way to the fields with his sister, Aime he comes across two white girls, Betty (aged 11) and Mary (aged 7). They ask him whether he knows where they could get some Maypops, a purple colour flower. George replies with a “no” and goes on his way but hears the girls planning to go down towards the railway tracks to look for the flowers. The morning after, the two girls were found murdered and their bodies dumped in a ditch by the railway tracks and George is immediately arrested simply because only he knew where the girls were. He is intimidated and pressurized by white police officers in the absence of his parents and is coerced into confessing to a crime he did not commit. After being put on trial he is found guilty by a jury of 12 white men and is sentenced to death by electrocution under the laws of the State of South Carolina. He is placed on the electric chair and 2400 volts of electricity is passed through his body until his last breath. He is the youngest person to be executed in the United States. This heart-breaking case is not the beginning nor is it the end of racial prejudice and discrimination against Black lives in the United States.
I was absolutely shocked and saddened after watching the short film titled The Current, a documentary about the execution of George Stinney. It was just incomprehensible to me that anyone could sentence a young child to death just by looking at his skin colour. No proper investigations were done to provide any evidence of George having murdered the two girls. He was put to death on an assumption solely based on his racial identity. Seventy years later, his case is re-evaluated after George’s siblings demand justice. On the 10th of December, 2014 George was exonerated and his conviction was vacated but an innocent Black boy had to pay with his life for the “mistakes” of a failing criminal justice system. Black people are perpetually dehumanized and criminalized by white supremacist discourses and racist practices. They are trapped within a culture and a system that victimizes them and renders them helpless against deep-seated prejudices and institutional flaws that provide no solace to ethnic or racial minorities.
It is very disturbing and almost ridiculous that such racist attitudes still prevail and that the justice system fails to perform its most fundamental duty. We still live in a society that does not allow difference, upholds prejudicial ideologies and breeds hatred towards ethnic or racial minorities by stereotyping and criminalizing them. George Stinney Jr’s execution is a permanent reminder of the cruelty of a social system that does not flinch before sending a child to an electric chair. This is a world where victims are further victimized and the perpetrators are set free.
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Current: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9cUaDcxYo8
(Warning: contains disturbing and violent scenes)
- Sasha Hewa
This post made me remember the case of Emmet Till. That was my very first encounter with brutality against the Black community in the USA. He too was a 14 year old boy wrongly accused of assaulting a White woman and was brutally murdered. It's a horrific case and has been haunting me especially because the woman who was 'assaulted' recently confessed to lying. These incidents are honestly so strange to me because no one ethnicity or race should be fighting for something as basic as equality. Interestingly, the recent hate crimes against Asian American's in the USA truly proves how far we are from progressing towards equality.
ReplyDelete-Nipuni
It's terrifying to read such accounts, and seems absolutely something out of a horror story. But the fact is that racial discrimination and skin colour prejudice is absolutely real and existing in numerous forms, despite laws and movements of equality and progression, and it's quiet subtle at times, and we fail to notice until damage is done, unaware (perhaps even aware) that we're being driven to judge by something so superficial as skin colour and race. We're definitely past the age of physical slavery, but what the White colonials then did physically to the Blacks whom they termed savages, a faction of us may be repeating the same brutality in subtler ways, in different and wider spheres, not physically but socially and/or psychologically, not just towards the Blacks, but with anyone with differences, be it skin or hair or anything at all. Why should difference hurt?
ReplyDeleteNuzla Niyas
Gosh I watched When They See Us pretty recently and was pretty much crying throughout the entire thing - it broke my heart :( I honestly cannot believe that things like this happen, I just can't. We have such a long way to go.
ReplyDeleteThe BLM movement brought many similar cases to my attention. I really find it hard to believe that people are still being treated like this merely because of their skin color. We're in the 21st century for crying out loud! We really do have such a long way to go...
ReplyDelete