Letter to the editor: Thanks to Biden for honoring Emmett Till

Leave it to a man of compassion, empathy, tolerance and decency like Joe Biden to spearhead the establishment of memorial statues to commemorate the savage murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy whose “capital crime” was to have allegedly whistled at a white woman.

Young Emmett was kidnapped from his home at gunpoint, tortured, his eye gouged out and murdered, his body thrown in a river by the racists who considered “uppity” Blacks to be unworthy of living.

Calling to mind Emmett Till would not be popular in some parts of the country in which America’s racist underpinnings are deemed too uncomfortable to acknowledge, something which needs to be erased from history.

It is gratifying that a president to whom civil rights has always been important has made it more likely that the memory of an atrocity, one for which the perpetrators tragically were not called to account, will endure. The president’s actions bring comfort to surviving members of Emmett’s family and to all whose lives have been impacted by racial animus.

Oren Spiegler

Peters