Oprah Winfrey on Monday said the killings of Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till are the "same thing."
This transpired during an interview with The Grio that aired on NBC's Today show (video follows with transcript and commentary):
OPRAH WINFREY: It's so easy during this time: Trayvon Martin, Trayvon Martin parallel to Emmett Till, let me just tell you. In my mind, same thing. But you can, you can get stuck in that and not allow yourself to move forward and to see how far we've come.
Really? Martin and Till are the same thing?
As race baiters in the media have been dishonestly making this claim since the George Zimmerman verdict was announced, let's take a look at what happened to Till almost 60 years ago and why it is shameful for folks to make such a comparison.
In 1955, Till was a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi. He spoke to a 21-year-old white woman named Carolyn Bryant who was the wife of a grocery store owner in the town.
Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Till's great-uncle's house, kidnapped Till, drove him to a barn where they proceeded to beat him, gouge out one of his eyes, shoot him in the head, and dispose of his body in the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire.
Does that even vaguely resemble what happened to Martin?
Of course it doesn't. Not even close.
But liberal media members have been shamefully making this case for weeks further dividing our nation along racial lines.
Winfrey as one of the most popular and successful African-Americans in this country should know better.
What she should have told The Grio is that people who are making such comparisons are dishonestly distorting the facts as well as ignoring how far we've come since then, and that doing so is setting us back rather than moving us forward.
But she didn't do that.
Instead, she channeled her inner Al Sharpton and joined the ranks of the other race baiters in the nation.
How unfortunate for all of us. How truly unfortunate.
