Remembering Emmett Till
Who would he have grown up to be?
That’s what has to be asked about too many Black boys. Trayvon Martin. Tamir Rice. Elijah McCain.
Emmett Till would have been seventy nine this year, putting him in the generation of many millennials’ grandparents. He would have been seventy nine, had a white woman not blatantly lied that the small child in question had accosted her at a grocery store. Emmett would likely have gone onto have his own children and grandchildren, had the liar’s white relatives not beaten the innocent child to a pulp, shot him, tied his lifeless body to a piece of machinery and dropped him in the river.
The graphic details of Emmett’s death are belied by the beauty in his smiling fourteen year old face. He’s remembered by his family as being extroverted, funny, prone to pranks. It’s easy to imagine his handsome young face growing into a man’s: attending college. Becoming an expert in a chosen field, a leader in his community, falling in love, and getting married. His mother bravely refused to hide what had happened to her son. When his graphically marred body was recovered, she insisted the casket remain open: “let the people see what they’ve done to my boy.” Jet magazine published the picture of the murdered boy next to the gorgeous face of the living one. The world saw.
Black people have been lynched for the four hundred years America has existed, and if the material details change the story itself never does. An innocent person was tortured and murdered. The white murderers walk free; acquitted-in the Emmett Till case- in sixty minutes by an all white jury. Pictures show them smoking cigars and hanging onto their laughing wives in celebration. It is impossible to look at those photographs of child murderers without a deep sense of nausea, no matter the color of your skin. Without justice, there will be no peace. For four hundred years, America has had neither.
Emmett’s mother Mamie Till at his funeral.
How do we remember the lives of the Black people- frequently Black children- who are murdered brutally and without consequence, without drowning the beauty and complexity of who they are with the gruesome details of the violence that ended their too short lives?
Psychologists are only now beginning to reckon with the realities of collective trauma that Black people are forced to reckon with simply by getting up and living in this country: the epigenetic imprints of generations of trauma, the material consequences of centuries of structural violence, the lived reality of being perpetually targeted on more levels than any one person should have to reckon with in a single life time but at a massive, community, multigenerational scale.
“Black America is so much more than what Black America has survived.”
No amount of spiritual or material reparation could ever undo what’s been done to Black people in this country. And saying that, it’s important to not let the Black story in America be told through the lens of violent white people.
Black America is so much more than what Black America has survived. There is no field in the country or world which has not been shaped by Black excellence, genius, ingenuity, creativity, and- yes- bravery and resilience.
Emmett Till is more than his murder. More, even, than the almost transcendent levels of courage shown by his mother in the aftermath of his death- courage that lit the flames of a Civil Rights Movement which changed the country, and the world. Emmett was a son, a friend, a student, and a prankster. He was a beautiful boy with a bright future, like so many beautiful boys with bright futures cut short by murderers in this country. Like Anne Frank, who he’s been compared to, he is a sunny child executed by a bigotry and violence which swallowed his future whole; leaving everything forever impacted in the jarring wake of his murdered innocence.
Today, we remember Emmett as the eternal child: a reminder to fight for all the other children who have too long in this country gone without the safety their childhood deserved.
