Willie Edwards Jr., a black truck driver, was killed by Ku Klux Klansmen who forced him to jump off a bridge in Alabama in 1957. Two years earlier, white men had bludgeoned black teenager Emmett Till to death in Mississippi. No one went to prison for either slaying.
Both people died in racist lynchings, and relatives of each were aghast Tuesday after President Donald Trump compared his own possible impeachment to lynching — racist killings, often for the purpose of inciting terror, that took an estimated 4,400 black lives over roughly seven decades in 20 states, mostly in the South.
Made in a tweet that drew backing from some Republican supporters including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Trump’s claim was ill-informed at best and racist at worst, they said. And it denigrated the fates of people who were hanged, beaten, shot, drowned, burned or battered to death because of the color of their skin, they said.
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