


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.

"Either he's very ignorant or very insensitive or very racist and just doesn't care," said 66-year-old Malinda Edwards, Willie Edwards' daughter.

Deborah Watts, a cousin of Till, called the president's tweet "insensitive and offensive."




Three men were indicted in Edwards' slaying in 1976, but a judge dismissed the case because the indictment didn't state a cause of death. Subsequent investigations led to no prosecutions, and all the suspects are now dead.




"He knows what he's doing. He knows how to hurt and divide," said Cohen, who wrote the play "Anne and Emmett" about an imaginary conversation between Till and Holocaust victim Anne Frank.


Josephine Bolling McCall, the daughter of lynching victim Elmore Bolling, said Trump's comment about lynching "hits harder than anything else he has done" as president.

"He has said a lot of things and done a lot of things I disagree with, but this is just immoral. He has no concept of what we have gone through. He has no concept of what a lynching is," said McCall, whose father was a black businessman who was shot by a white neighbor near Montgomery in 1947.


Edwards, who lives in Dayton, Ohio, said she feels sick in her stomach any time she hears the word "lynching," and Trump's tweet was no different. Trump's message was all the worse because it displayed indifference to the victims of actual lynchings and their descendants, Edwards said.

"It says to them that 'What happened to you is like nothing more than an investigation.' These are people who went through the most gruesome and heinous things that could be done to them," said Edwards.



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