Last night 60 Minutes featured 3 great stories. I intend to highlight each of them. For today, I'm going to post the story of the murder of Louis Allen. It was by far the most troubling of the three stories. It featured the story of a black man in Mississippi who was murdered in the 1960's because he claimed he had witnessed a white Congressman shoot a black man, had been pressured into lying that the shooting had been self-defense, had come forward, and was murdered.
The main suspect, and also the investigator of the murder, was a deputy sheriff who is sill alive. The interviews were pretty scary. It is unbelievable to me how awful the South was back then, and how bad things are now, just because so many of those crimes have been lied about and lived with for 50 or 60 years.
Ironically, I received an email link to an article on how we are still fighting the Civil War, 150 years later. The article highlights the lack of compromise because people believe they are morally right, issues of secession or nullification which the Tea Party brings up, restrictions of civil liberties and underestimating the cost of war. I take it as oversensitivity that they didn't also bring up the major issue of race. It seems to underlie much of the Tea Party platform. What really strikes me is how the evil acts of 50 years ago, and their continued cover up prevent us from moving on. Anyway, here is the video, watch it and see how you feel afterwards.
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