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“A cousin of the late Emmett Till wonders if Lil Wayne understands just how damaging it was when he rapped a vulgar reference to the black U.S. teen whose death in 1955 became a significant moment in the civil rights movement. Airickca Gordon-Taylor says Till's family would like an apology from Lil Wayne for the brief but disturbing lyric on Future's "Karate Chop" remix. But more than that, she'd like the platinum-selling New Orleans rapper to understand how his comparison of a sex act to the 14-year-old Chicago native's torture death in Mississippi is hurtful to the black community. "It was a heinous murder," Gordon-Taylor said in a phone interview Thursday from Chicago. "He was brutally beaten and tortured, and he was shot, wrapped in barbed wire and tossed in the Tallahatchie River. The images that we're fortunate to have (of his open casket) that 'Jet' published, they demonstrate the ugliness of racism. So to compare a woman's anatomy — the gateway of life — to the ugly face of death, it just destroyed me. And then I had to call the elders in my family and explain to them before they heard it from some another source.”

Emmett Till’s family reacts to Lil Wayne lyric - Yahoo! News

Is Lil’ Wayne wrong? Why or why not? — tanya b.

“after the murder, after the burial Emmett's mother is a pretty-faced thing; the tint of pulled taffy. She sits in a red room, drinking black coffee. She kissed her killed boy. And she is sorry. Chaos in windy grays through a red prairie.”

—gwendolyn brooks, the last quatrain of the ballad of emmett till.
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