"The Atlantic's" latest late-breaking Emmett Till news is from 1544

Seriously.

From the October 2024 issue of The Atlantic:

To Understand Mississippi, I Went to Spain

The forces that would shape my home state’s violent history were set in motion by a 480-year-old map made by a Spanish explorer.

By Wright Thompson

September 17, 2024, 7 AM ET

The city of Seville awoke early, the old streets alive with singing birds and distant bells. The cobblestone alleys smelled faintly of hidden gardens. I’d flown here for a chance to hold a 480-year-old map in my hand. …

I’d come researching my new book, The Barn, a history of the 36 square miles of dirt around the place where Emmett Till was tortured and killed in 1955.

The barn, which I first wrote about for this magazine, sits in the southwestern quarter of Section 2, Township 22 North, Range 4 West, measured from the Choctaw Meridian. The township has been home to the civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer; to the family of the Confederate general and early Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest; to farmland owned by James R. Binford, an original legal architect of Jim Crow. It’s borne witness to the creation of the blues at Dockery Plantation; to the erasure of a Native American community; and, of course, to the death of Till. With so much violent history in such proximity, this project almost inevitably became a mapping. That led me on a hunt for the very first map of this land, which was likely drawn in 1544 by a Spanish cartographer named Alonso de Santa Cruz.

Take that, 1619 Project! I’ve beaten you by 75 years!

Of course, before 1544, Mississippi didn’t have any violent history. (It just had violent pre-history, but that doesn’t count.)

Seriously, this is yet another amusing example of the antiquarianism of contemporary progressivism. The further we get into our current era when progressive nostrums dominate all thought about race, the more we have to obsess over the increasingly distant past. Not just Emmett Till’s death in 1955, but how 1544 caused 1955.

As for race in the 2020s, well, who can remember that far back?

Here’s a graph I made from CDC cause-of-death data.

There’s nothing special about the trends in Mississippi of more blacks dying violently during the Great Awokening. All over the country, as BLM rose in influence and cops pulled back in response, blacks started dying more in Deaths of Depolicing (car crashes and shootings) after Ferguson in later 2014, with an explosion in the weeks following George Floyd in 2020.

But when is The Atlantic going to get around to mentioning that?

But when would The Atlantic have time to tell us that the once-celebrated “racial reckoning” promoted by the triumphant Black Lives Matter movement got a whole lot of incremental black lives murdered and splattered on the pavement, not when somebody has figured out a way to blame Emmett Till’s demise on white people an extra 75 years earlier?