Friday morning, while filling in on MSNBC for anchor Thomas Roberts, NBC News’ Craig Melvin chose not to correct a guest who falsely described George Zimmerman, the Florida man recently acquitted for the fatal shooting of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin, as a “white boy.”
Zimmerman is Hispanic.
The guest was Simeon Wright, cousin of Emmett Till, the black fourteen-year-old tortured and lynched in 1955. Till’s brutal murder was a turning point in the Civil Rights movement.
MSNBC Anchor Craig Melvin: …Oprah Winfrey just recently caught some flak for comparing the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin to the murder of Emmett Till. [They] were killed under different circumstances; what do you make of those comparisons that are being made between the two?
Simeon Wright: The comparison to me is similar; there are a lot of parallels between Emmett Till and Trayvon Martin. Number one: Trayvon was killed by a white boy that got out of his truck armed to the teeth — chased him down, did kill him. And then the jury did the same thing they did in 1955 with Emmett Tille: they came back with a non-guilty vote. That broke my heart. That tells me that things have not changed as much as people would like to say they have changed. I asked my wife this morning if she had ever been consulted on one of these polls [that show racism is less of a problem today]. I’ve never been asked about one of these polls.
MSNBC Anchor: We’ll leave it there.
Melvin’s editorial decision to let the falsehood about Zimmerman’s race stand as a truth is in keeping with the cynical, inflammatory, and dishonest way almost all of the media have reported on the Zimmerman case, not just NBC News.
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