Emmett Till would, and should, be celebrating his eighty-second birthday today - just a little older than my mom and dad, whom I'll be traveling to see very soon.

Till, visiting family from his home in Chicago, was murdered in the small town of Money, Mississippi, by folks who "take care of their own."

The purpose of the murder was vengeance against Till for having the temerity to exist and to breathe the same air as the very white, very upstanding, very small-town people of Money. It was also a warning to anyone else who looked like Till that they'd better not try that in a small town where people "take care of their own" and define "their own" in the most appalling of ways.

The Jason Aldean shit got stuck in my craw again today, and I was going to write something long and critical about how he DIDN’T grow up in a small town. He grew up in a majority Black city, Macon, Georgia, but CHOSE to attend a Christian school where the student body is STILL over 90% white in 2023. I was gonna write about how the town where he filmed his video, Columbia, Tennessee, is no longer a small town, but it WAS one in 1927 when Henry Choate was tied to the back of a car and dragged through the streets of that small town before being hanged right where Aldean CHOSE to stage his video.

I was gonna write about how the whole point of Sundown Towns across America was never having to SAY the words, “Get out by dark, N*****,” because that shit is IMPLIED by the militancy of statements like, “We protect our own round here,” when “our own,” are all fish-belly white and hair-trigger angry about them “outsiders from the city coming 'round here to do no good."

Just ask Ahmaud Arbery's people about that.