“How Emmett Till Changed The World”: The Brutal Lynching Of A Black Teen In Mississippi Helped Shape The Civil-Rights Movement
Before Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, and 12-year-old Tamir Rice, there was Emmett Till.
Till, a 14-year-old Chicago native, was brutally beaten and lynched while visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, in the summer of 1955.
His crime? Allegedly whistling at a white woman.
This weekend marks the 60th anniversary of the tragic murder of Emmett Till. There will be commemorative events honoring the life of the young teen in Chicago and Mississippi. And that’s because, according to Chris Benson, associate professor of African American studies and journalism at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Till’s death still resonates today.
“The reason we are so captivated by the lynching of Emmett Till 60 years later is that it’s justice that has not been reached. It grates against our sense of justice in America that this horrible event has never been resolved,” says Benson, who co-authored the book, Death of Innocence with Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley. “We see so many similar cases coming up in the contemporary moment that remind us of the injustice in the Emmett Till case. When we see the case of Trayvon Martin or Michael Brown or Tamir Rice, where young Black males are shot down by authority figures and nobody’s punished, it reminds us of the most celebrated case where a Black teen was killed and nobody was brought to justice.”
History notes that Till was with a group of teenagers who had stopped at a local grocery store to buy snacks when he broke Mississippi’s racial code of conduct. Just a year earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had announced separate but equal schools were unconstitutional in the historic Brown v. Board of education case. But things were still done a little differently in Mississippi. The state fought against any interruption in its system of segregation and often resorted to violence.
So it was in this space that four days after his alleged “crime,” Till was kidnapped in the wee hours of the morning on August 28, 1955 by two white men, Roy Bryant, husband of Carolyn Bryant, the store clerk Till allegedly whistled at, and J.W. Milam.
Bryant and Milan tortured Till for hours. He was brutally beaten. Barbed wire tied around his neck. He was shot in the head. The young teen was weighted with a cotton gin fan and thrown in the Tallatchie River. Three days later, Till’s bloated body surfaced, his face severely disfigured. He was identified by a ring on his finger, one his mother had given him that had his father’s initials.
When Till’s body arrived in Chicago, Mamie Till Mobley couldn’t believe her eyes. She wanted to show the world what Mississippi had done to her son, her only child. Mobley demanded an open-casket at Till’s funeral. His mutilated body was on display for five days as more than 100,000 folks lined the streets of Chicago to get a glimpse of what hate could do. The graphic images were published in Jet magazine and Black newspapers. Her decision changed the course of history.
“Opening that casket and allowing Emmett Till’s body to lay in state allowed people to witness the horrible face of race hatred,” said Benson. “It horrified people to the extent that they had never seen anything like this and to imagine that our children could be subjected to such horrors really moved people. So opening the casket opened our eyes to the injustice in this country and the consequences of that continued injustice if we didn’t do something about it.”
But justice would never come.
It took just little more than an hour for an all-white male jury to acquit Bryant and Milam of the murder of Emmett Till. Months later, Look magazine paid Bryant and Milam $4,000 so they would reveal how they killed the Chicago teen.
The fact that two white men were not convicted of murdering a young Black boy was not surprising in 1955 Mississippi. But what was surprising was the bravery and courage of Till’s uncle Mose Wright, who stood up during the trial and pointed to Bryant and Milam as the men who had kidnapped Till. It was nearly unheard of for a Black man to oppose a white man in court. In doing so, Wright put his own life in danger and immediately left Mississippi soon after.
“Understanding the context in the South at that time, for him to do that was nothing short of courageous,” says Paula Johnson, law professor and co-director of the Cold Case Justice Initiative at Syracuse University. The initiative investigates racially-motivated murders that occurred during the civil rights era.
Two months after Milam and Bryant were acquitted for the murder of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus, sparking the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott and the beginning of a Civil Rights Movement led by a young minister by the name of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The fight for civil rights, which had mostly been a legal strategy up until that time, had become a mass movement. Soon after there were Freedom Rides, sit-ins at lunch counters, boycotts, demonstrations, and marches. And all of this can be traced back to Emmett Till.
“As we talk about Black Lives Matter, this is what Mamie Till Mobley was saying to us—‘My son’s life matters,’” says Johnson. “Till was not the first lynching but it was a defining moment in so many ways. Emmett Till’s murder galvanized an activist movement of that which continues today.”
Indeed, during the Movement for Black Lives conference in Cleveland this summer, activists of the Black Lives Matter movement honored the families of civil rights martyrs. The first image was of Emmett Till.
Airickca Gordon-Taylor, cousin of Emmett Till and president of the Mamie Till Mobley Memorial Foundation, spoke at the Movement for Black Lives conference. She says Till kicked off the Black Lives Matter movement and noted that he was “a sacrificial lamb.”
“There are so many parallels today to what happened in 1955 and if we’re not careful all of our rights will be stripped away again,” Gordon-Taylor told The Daily Beast. “We have to be very diligent and very mindful and we have to come together as a community to work towards putting people in positions and roles that have our best interests at heart to work toward changing these policies.”
The Justice Department re-opened Till’s case in 2004. His body was exhumed and an autopsy was conducted but it was closed three years later due to the statute of limitations and insufficient evidence. But though no one was ever convicted for the murder of Emmett Till, his name will be forever associated with the fight for justice and civil rights. His life will not be forgotten. In fact, there are several movies being made about Emmett Till. A film based on Benson’s book will begin production next year, and it was recently announced that Jay-Z and Will Smith will produce a movie about Till for HBO.
“In so many ways, the case of Emmett Till was the first Black Lives Matter case,” says Benson. “Emmett Till is certainly a story about racial injustice. It’s a story about white supremacy. But within those elements is a recognition that this is really a story about power. Emmett Till was killed as an expression of power—power over the black body. We have to ask: What might had he been if he had lived?”
By: Lottie L. Joiner, The Daily Beast, August 28, 2015
“It’s About Treating Where It Hurts”: ‘All Lives Matter’ — Words Of Moral Cowardice
This is a column about three words of moral cowardice:
“All lives matter.”
Those words have risen as a kind of counter to “Black lives matter,” the movement that coalesced in response to recent killings and woundings of unarmed African-Americans by assailants — usually police officers — who often go unpunished. Mike Huckabee raised that counter-cry last week, telling CNN, “When I hear people scream ‘black lives matter,’ I’m thinking, of course they do. But all lives matter. It’s not that any life matters more than another.”
As if that were not bad enough, the former Arkansas governor and would-be president upped the ante by adding that Martin Luther King would be “appalled by the notion that we’re elevating some lives above others.”
“Elevating some lives.” Lord, have mercy.
Imagine for a moment that you broke your left wrist. In excruciating pain, you rush to the emergency room for treatment only to run into a doctor who insists on examining not just your mangled left wrist, but your uninjured right wrist, rib cage, femur, fibula, sacrum, humerus, phalanges, the whole bag of bones that is you. You say, “Doc, it’s just my left wrist that hurts.” And she says, “Hey, all bones matter.”
If you understand why that remark would be factual, yet also fatuous, silly, patronizing and off point, then you should understand why “All lives matter” is the same. It’s not about “elevating some lives” any more than it would be about elevating some bones. Rather, it’s about treating where it hurts.
And as for Dr. King: I cringe at his name being invoked by yet another conservative who has apparently never heard or read anything King said with the possible exception of the last few minutes of the “I Have A Dream” speech. No one with the slightest comprehension of what King fought for could seriously contend he would be “appalled” at a campaign geared to the suffering of African-American people.
Whose rights did the Montgomery bus boycott seek to vindicate? For whose freedom was King jailed in Birmingham, punched in Selma and stoned in Chicago? In his book Why We Can’t Wait, King answered complaints that we shouldn’t be doing something special for “the Negro” by noting that, “our society has been doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years.”
Does that sound like someone who’d be “appalled” by “Black lives matter”?
No, that cry would likely resonate for him for the same reason it resonates for so many others. Namely because, while police abuse is not unknown in other lives, it is disproportionate in black lives. This is what Huckabee and the “All lives matter” crowd quail at recognizing. To treat where it hurts, one must first acknowledge that it still hurts, something conservatives often find hard to do because it gives the lie to their self-congratulatory balloon juice about how this country has overcome its founding sin.
That sort of willful ignorance has unfortunately become ubiquitous.
Which is why, for me, at least, the most inspiring sight to come out of Charleston following the racial massacre there was not the lowering of the Confederate battle flag, welcome as that was. Rather, it was a march through town by a mostly white crowd chanting, “Black lives matter! Black lives matter!” To see those white sisters and brothers adopt that cry was a soul-filling reminder that at least some of us still realize we all have access — connection — to each other’s pain and joy by simple virtue of the fact that we all are human.
God love them, they did not slink guiltily from that connection. Instead, they ran bravely to it.
And you know what, Mike Huckabee? Martin Luther King would have been pleased.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, August 24, 2015
“It’s Time To Leave Home”: There Is Nowhere You Can Go And Only Be With People Who Are Like You; It’s Over, Give It Up
When I think about the problem of big money in politics and the challenges we face to citizen engagement, I am reminded of a prophetic speech Bernice Johnson Reagon (founder of “Sweet Honey in the Rock” – featured below) gave in 1981 titled: Coalition Politics: Turning the Century. She begins by summarizing the impact technology has had on our social constructs:
We’ve pretty much come to the end of a time when you can have a space that is “yours only”—just for the people you want to be there…To a large extent it’s because we have just finished with that kind of isolating. There is no hiding place. There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. It’s over. Give it up.
David Simon captured how the re-election of Barack Obama sealed this change when he talked about the death of normal.
America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying…
What makes Reagon’s words so prophetic is that she talked about what our reaction would likely be to this reality. We are seeing it play out today in the tension between the supporters of Bernie Sanders and the Black Lives Matter movement. She warned that it would lead us to retreat to spaces she called “home.”
Now every once in awhile there is a need for people to try to clean out corners and bar the doors and check everybody who comes in the door, and check what they carry in and say, “Humph, inside this place the only thing we are going to deal with is X or Y or Z.” And so only the X’s or Y’s or Z’s get to come in…
But that space while it lasts should be a nurturing space where you sift out what people are saying about you and decide who you really are. And you take the time to try to construct within yourself and within your community who you would be if you were running society. In fact, in that little barred room where you check everybody at the door, you act out community. You pretend that your room is a world.
She said that there are dangers associated with pretending “that your room is a world.”
I mean it’s nurturing, but it is also nationalism. At a certain stage nationalism is crucial to a people if you are going to ever impact as a group in your own interest. Nationalism at another point becomes reactionary because it is totally inadequate for surviving in the world with many peoples.
In order to survive in this world with many peoples, we have to learn how to build coalitions.
Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort. Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home! They’re looking for a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple, which does not happen in a coalition. You don’t get a lot of food in a coalition. You don’t get fed a lot in a coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can’t stay there all the time. You go to the coalition for a few hours and then you go back and take your bottle wherever it is, and then you go back and coalesce some more.
It is very important not to confuse them—home and coalition.
She says that forming coalitions is a matter of life and death.
It must become necessary for all of us to feel that this is our world…And watch that “ours’ make it as big as you can—it ain’t got nothing to do with that barred room. The “our” must include everybody you have to include in order for you to survive. You must be sure you understand that you ain’t gonna be able to have an “our” that don’t include Bernice Johnson Reagon, cause I don’t plan to go nowhere! That’s why we have to have coalitions. Cause I ain’t gonna let you live unless you let me live. Now there’s danger in that, but there’s also the possibility that we can both live—if you can stand it.
The tensions we’re currently seeing in our politics are a direct result of people looking for a home and being fearful of a coalition. Too many of us are simply seeking out the comfort of those who are like us and/or agree with us. As a weigh station to nurture ourselves, there is value in that. But in the end, we have to leave home and face the world as it really is.
This is exactly the message President Obama gave to the young graduates of Morehouse in 2013.
As Morehouse Men, many of you know what it’s like to be an outsider; know what it’s like to be marginalized; know what it’s like to feel the sting of discrimination. And that’s an experience that a lot of Americans share…
So it’s up to you to widen your circle of concern — to care about justice for everybody, white, black and brown. Everybody. Not just in your own community, but also across this country and around the world. To make sure everyone has a voice, and everybody gets a seat at the table…
President Obama’s rhetoric about this is often uplifting and visionary. That is as it should be. But Reagon got down to the nitty gritty in her speech about what this actually means for all of us. Anyone thinking it’s about some kind of kumbaya moment is very mistaken.
There is an offensive movement that started in this country in the 60’s that is continuing. The reason we are stumbling is that we are at the point where in order to take the next step we’ve got to do it with some folk we don’t care too much about. And we got to vomit over that for a little while. We must just keep going.
In other words, its time to leave home, vomit for a little while about that, and get busy dealing with the world as it is rather than as we want it to be. In the end, its about survival…”Cause I ain’t gonna let you live unless you let me live. Now there’s danger in that, but there’s also the possibility that we can both live—if you can stand it.”
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 16, 2015
“Racism And Classism”: Ben Carson Makes The Leap That Far Too Many People Do To Avoid The Topic Of Racism
It’s clear that the reason Ben Carson got a jump in the polls after the first Republican debate is because he said this:
You know, we have the purveyors of hatred who take every single incident between people of two races and try to make a race war out of it, and drive wedges into people. And this does not need to be done.
What we need to think about instead — you know, I was asked by an NPR reporter once, why don’t I talk about race that often. I said it’s because I’m a neurosurgeon. And she thought that was a strange response. And you say — I said, you see, when I take someone to the operating room, I’m actually operating on the thing that makes them who they are. The skin doesn’t make them who they are. The hair doesn’t make them who they are. And it’s time for us to move beyond that.
But then his whole campaign got derailed when it was made public that he had participated in research using fetal tissue from abortions. After attempting to make excuses for his blatant hypocrisy in condemning Planned Parenthood, Carson tried to get things back on track by writing an op-ed for The Hill.
Cason begins by relaying some of his own story and then suggests that he is going to use his own experience to talk about racism.
But the major factor in how my life has turned out was — and is — my attitude and ability to choose the object of my concentration.
My views on race in this country start from that perspective. While I advocate for a colorblind society, I am by no means blind to the reality of racism. But again it comes down to a matter of focus. I believe that if we focus on what divides us rather than what unites us, we impede our ability to transcend differences and work together constructively toward a better future for all Americans.
What follows is actually NOT a discussion of racism in this country – but a discussion about poverty, and what we should/shouldn’t do about it (hint: same old Republican line about the failure of the war on poverty).
The reason this is so interesting is that within the scope of a few sentences, Carson makes the leap that far too many people do to avoid the topic of racism. By switching to a discussion of poverty, his prescriptions are all about what poor (i.e., black) people need to do to stop being poor. If you think that has anything to do with racism, you just put the whole onus of stopping it on poor black people. Here’s how Carson does that:
The assumption that people are “poor” grounds them in a mentality that reduces agency and creates more dependency. And more tragically, it obscures the reality that there is an abundance of opportunity that is ready for people who want to avail themselves of it.
This is why it is so important for white progressives to get this right. The impetus for the Black Lives Matter movement is the killing of black people – often by police officers. I can’t think of one of those deaths that was related to poverty. Many of the victims were actually middle class. It is the “mentality” of those who pulled the trigger (usually white men) that is the problem.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 15, 2015
“Speaking To Our Anxieties”: The Pissed-Off Primary; Bernie Sanders Vs. Donald Trump
Apart from surprising popularity, weird hair, and zero chance at actually becoming president, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders could hardly seem more different. One’s a socialist-hating billionaire and the other is a billionaire-hating socialist, right? Yet there they are, delivering boffo poll numbers long after everyone in the smart set had written them off as flashes in the pan.
Perhaps, like Austin Powers and Dr. Evil, they’re not so different after all. Indeed, the unanticipated appeal of Trump and Sanders to Republican and Democratic primary voters comes from the same psychological wellspring. They represent, in the words of Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist Salena Zito, “populism born of frustration.” They are angry candidates, bitching and moaning about the sorry shape of the United States and they are unabashedly protectionist. Each identifies immigrants and overseas competition as the root cause of most if not all of our problems. They both believe that if only we can wall off the country—literally in The Donald’s case and figuratively in Sanders’—we could “Make America Great Again!” (as Trump puts it in his campaign slogan).
Trump notoriously looks at Mexicans sneaking across the border and sees crime lords, drug dealers, and rapists, though he has magnamiously granted that “some, I assume, are good people.” Sanders, for his part, looks at the same hard cases and sees a reserve army of future wages slaves for the Koch brothers.
In an interview with Vox, Sanders was asked what he thought about increasing immigration in order to help poor foreigners increase their standard of living. “That’s a Koch brothers proposal,” he huffed, “That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States.” So much for the internationalism and universal brotherhood on which socialism once prided itself.
Being anti-immigrant isn’t a new position for Sanders. As Politico noted earlier this year, Sanders’s loyalty to the AFL-CIO and other labor unions undergirds his consistent opposition to opening up borders and his contempt for free-trade agreements.
In regularly complaining about China, Sanders sounds just like…Donald Trump. Riffing in post-industrial Michigan on August 11, Trump noted China’s currency devaluation and announced, “Devalue means, suck the blood out of the United States!”
For good measure, Trump also attacked Sanders as a weakling even as he saluted him as a brother in spirit. Commenting on how the Vermont senator lost the microphone to Black Lives Matter activist at a recent event in Seattle, Trump said, “I felt badly for him, but it showed that he was weak. You know what? He’s getting the biggest crowds, and we’re getting the biggest crowds. We’re the ones getting the crowds.”
Indeed, they are. Even after gracelessly implying Fox News moderator Megyn Kelly suffered from PMS during the first Republican candidates’ debate, Trump leads among GOP voters with 23 percent and Sanders has “surged” ahead of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire polls.
Despite this, there’s no chance either will win his party’s nomination, much less become president. As Jack Shafer has noted, they are less candidates and more demagogues, who trade in “anger and resentment to attract supporters.” Such intensity can get you a hard-core band of supporters—just ask George Wallace or Ross Perot—but it also ultimately limits the broad-based support necessary to pull enough votes even in hotly contested three-way elections.
Which isn’t to say that Trump and Sanders haven’t already had a major impact. In the early stages of the campaign, they are tapping into immense voter dissatisfaction with not just the Republican and Democratic Party establishments but a 21st-century status quo that is in many ways genuinely depressing and disappointing. Trump and Sanders offer seemingly authentic responses to and truly simplistic solutions for what ails us. Close the borders! Fuck the Chinese!
What’s most worrisome is that other candidates who are more likely to actually succeed in 2016 will try to win over Trump’s or Sanders’s supporters by co-opting their Fortress America mentality. All of the GOP contenders except Jeb Bush have called for some type of impenetrable border with Mexico as a precondition for discussing any changes in immigration numbers. By and large, they have also signed on to mandatory use of E-Verify, a national database that would effectively turn work into a government-granted privilege while increasing the reach of the surveillance state.
Though she pushed for President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal while secretary of state, Hillary Clinton has flip-flopped and now is a critic of the deal. If Sanders continues to eat her lunch or even nibble around its edges through the end of the year, look for her to rethink her generally positive position on immigration too.
Trump’s and Sanders’s appeal isn’t hard to dope out.Twice as many of us—60 percent—think the country is headed in the wrong direction as think it’s going in the right direction. Trust in government has been skidding since the 1960s and the general loss of faith has accelerated since the 9/11 attacks. Trump and Sanders speak to our anxieties with a mix of shouty slogans, moral certitude, and magical policies on everything from health care to the minimum wage to ISIS.
In the current moment, it’s the billionaire and the socialist who feel our pain. But if their Republican and Democratic opponents adopt their xenophobia and protectionist ideas, they will have helped increase our pain long after they’ve inevitability sunk in the polls.
By: Nick Gillespie, The Daily Beast, August 13, 2015
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