The Chicago White Sox have said it was “poor form” for the team to show a scoreboard graphic of “famous people from Chicagoland” that grouped lynching victim Emmett Till alongside game show host Pat Sajak and Orson Welles.
The graphic was shown during Saturday’s Major League Baseball game against the Minnesota Twins.
“It was done as a list of famous and iconic Chicagoans, so the [staff member responsible] felt like Emmett Till is an iconic face of the civil rights movement in Chicago,” said Scott Reifert, the club’s senior vice-president for communications, on Sunday.
“I pointed out that, probably in retrospect, it’s poor form … The intent certainly wasn’t to insult anybody, not Emmett Till by any means. It was, in a sense, famous Chicagoans.”
I have questions. pic.twitter.com/I3hSbaMedv
— Charlie J. Johnson (@Charliemagne) June 29, 2019
Reifert said the staff member will not be disciplined.
“The other point I made with him was, next to Pat Sajak, [it] kind of minimalizes [the fact that this] is a young man that lost his life and certainly has become an icon of the civil rights movement, but for not good reasons.”
Till was 14 when he was murdered while visiting family in Mississippi. He was kidnapped and brutally killed after he was accused of flirting with a white woman.
The woman’s husband and half-brother were later acquitted by an all-white jury. The woman admitted years later that she had made up many of the details involved in the case.
The case shocked the United States, bringing renewed attention to the lynching of African Americans, and is considered a watershed moment in the civil rights movement.
