HAHAHAHAHHA oh fuck that is funny

I think of this whenever we see someone who's been wearing a loincloth for entirely too long. Mowgli can't have any place to wash that thing...

There are toilets in these cells, we establish them, but obviously he hasn't tried to USE it, or he'd have fallen in long ago. ALL DRAINS LEAD TO THE OCEAN.

Quite a good point. X3

As a Canadian, the relevance of the otters' names is somewhat lost on me.

Who'd you think it was, Missisauga's own Triumph guitarist Rik Emmet?
There's legitimately no other famous person named Emmett, it appears...
Emmett Till, here you go. (I'ma see how much of this I know from memory; I spent a summer workcamp in the Mississippi delta, mostly Cary, painting/furnishing mobile homes for people displaced by the 2011 flood, and heard most of this at the root. It's still raw.)

The Michael Brown of the '50s civil rights movement, lot of stories floating around; Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old in summer 1955 who went from his hometown of Chicago to Money, Mississippi to visit relatives. He had a stutter (childhood case of polio, putting you in historical perspective) that he whistled to cope with, and a pair of guys thought they heard him whistle at a white woman; reports vary as to what exactly instigated all this. The owner of the store this took place in and his half brother drove around until at like two in the morning they found the house he was staying at, led him out of the house at gunpoint.

Further accounts vary, but his naked body was fished out of the river three days later, beaten beyond the point of any human recognition, an eye gouged out, shot through the forehead, weighted down by a stolen cotton gin fan tied to him with barbed wire, and nude except for a ring on his finger they were able to identify him by. The pictures alone'll make you puke, much less reading the coroner's inquiry. It became a national outcry and one of the first cases where the American public opinion turned against lynching, especially after every civil rights organization ever raised hell about it, after the open-casket funeral (front page gore in every paper in the country) and after the suspects being acquitted after half an hour of jury deliberation, at which point (now that they were protected from double jeopardy) they cheerfully confessed to the murder in grisly, southern-fried detail, "I'm gonna make an example of you just to show you how me and my folks stand," insisting that they had only planned to beat him up until he talked back to them (sealing his fate); in some accounts, he showed them photos of his white girlfriend up north (which nobody in his family or friends circle say he had, it's probably just a very good sound bite to get southern sympathy against him; I can't imagine anyone in his situation doing that). Also, in the jury, for the first time in living memory, a black guy (Moses Wright) identifying a white guy (the half-brother) to the court before testifying against him (which, for the record, in this time and place, you risked being lynched yourself for less). People got angry for the first time. Fired a lot of circuits.

In short, not fun. If you're an American making a movie about racism and name the McGuffin missing person "Emmett," you have to know that this is what people are ognna think of.

I was never taught about this in school. Dear god, what a monstrous murder! The suspects should have had their trigger fingers — or at least their thumbs — blown off, preferably at point-blank range, for such a sickening act and (moreso) for taking pride in it!

How are Canadian civil rights handled in the schools? I've heard people testify they never even learned that Canada was a slaveowning nation (and in some ways worse... the South used slavery as an economic resource, Quebec used them as status symbol trophies). Or at least a Christopher Paul Curtis novel or two in fifth grade reading?
Makes you wonder what, in sixty years, the textbooks will leave out, and you'll have to tell your kids that this "wasn't at all how it happened." Especially since all the school textbooks in the country are beholden to the Texas Board of Education, as the largest single market, and they routinely censor things that, say, criticize Reagan or imply that Mexico rightfully owned Texan land instead of the pioneers. There's a lot of fucked up things in the world.

*shrugs* It's Mississippi in the 1950s. They knew they'd get free drinks at any local bar for the rest of their lives, but in the short term, this was the honor of a white woman; you have no idea how big that is down there.

Hey, where you see "monstrous," they see "I may have an awful, shitty, impoverished existence, and the one thing I have going for me is White Privilege, so I want to make that count for as much as I possibly can." About 90% of Southern culture is revengeful shitting-upon. They explicitly said he was basically a target by proxy for all "the goddamn Yankees and carpetbaggers who come down here and think they know better than us how to live our lives." That's the other 10% of Southern culture, same as Russian culture, is resentment for all the people trying to change it, which is why the problems still persist. Any attempt on you to get them to move only makes them dig in their heels.

_{I'd... if you've never been so far South as to even hear this story in passing, I might recommend "Better Off Without 'em." A guy wrote a book arguing, point by point, that the South is a liability on America, a third-world country still welded on, driving down labor rates and educational standards and sucking down tax dollars and increasing our obesity rates, so wouldn't it be better for all of us to let them loose and let them do as they want? Undo the Civil War. The whole book is great, every single Amazon review is either five stars or zero stars. Main reason it'll never happen is partly the state governments know how much they rely on the federal government for basic subsistence, and the question "what happens to Texas." Texas is kinda its own thing. He argues, of course, that we would have to keep Texas for basic security reasons - 60% of our military infrastructure is in the South, 30% in Texas, and if the South declares war on us (which you know goddamn well they'll try), we'll need to have at least some of that on our side.}

Not familiar with Christopher Paul Curtis either.
We learned about the Underground Railroad and touched on Africville, but I never heard of the "symbol trophies" part.
We DID learn about how the First Nations were shafted, what with the Residential schools and banning of the potlatch ceremonies.

"You could say, he's full of crap"

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Aww no the poor love! Mr.Otterton is so cute though...