Courtroom 302

Content Warning: The source material and this guide contain extensive discussion of mass incarceration, systemic racism, and substance use disorders. They also touch on topics of sexual assault, domestic and child abuse, and hate crimes. This guide obscures the n-word when reproduced in quotes.

When three white teenagers in the Bridgeport section of Chicago beat 13-year-old Lenard Clark almost to death in March 1997, the city’s Black community immediately recalled the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Till was a 14-year-old Chicago native tortured and lynched by two white men—Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J. W. Milam—in Money, Mississippi, where Till had been visiting relatives. Till’s offense was that he supposedly whistled at Bryant’s wife, Carolyn. An all-white jury acquitted Bryant and Milam. Knowing that double jeopardy laws would prevent them from being tried again for the same crime, the men confessed to murdering Till in the January 1956 Look magazine feature “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” In 2017, Carolyn Bryant (later, Donham) confessed to a historian that she had lied about the details of her encounter with Till.

For over half a century, the story of Till’s murder has been a symbol of Black people’s vulnerability within an intrinsically racist justice system—one that so insufficiently recognizes the humanity of Black people that it cannot even manage to protect murdered or assaulted children. Though Till’s murder was a major catalyst for the civil rights movement, the memory of his lynching is resurrected in every public instance in which a Black boy is beaten, tortured, or murdered in a hate crime or during instances of supposed community vigilantism. 

The attempted murder of Lenard Clark reinforced within many Black Chicagoans the feeling they had never really escaped the violence that had afflicted their Southern ancestors. Instead, it seemed they had simply traded one form of racism for another. Though Black Chicago boys did not risk being lynched for flirting with white girls, they were still in danger of being beaten or killed for entering predominantly white neighborhoods, as Clark had. Similarly, Black Chicagoans, like Black Mississippians, lacked faith in a justice system dominated by white prosecutors, white defense attorneys, white judges, and even predominantly white juries. This fact, coupled with the decreased tendency to convict white defendants, created little faith that the system would handle Clark’s case any better than it had Till’s, despite the passage of 42 years.