The first time my students saw the picture of Emmett Till's beaten, bloated, disfigured face, their reaction wasn't one I expected. Typically we react to something disturbing with jokes. There's always someone in a crowded movie theater of a horror movie who blurts out something sarcastic to ease the mood of the room, to make everyone remind themselves that it's just make believe. Reality is a bit different. It's tough to see those old black and white photos. Black and white photos are the indicator of authenticity.
My fifth grade students have seen the PBS documentary, "The Murder of Emmett Till," for the past two years. I usually wait until completing chapter 22 of "To Kill a Mockingbird," just after the jury convicts Tom Robinson of raping a white woman. It's always the best part of the book, reading those courtroom scenes, trying to channel my inner Gregory Peck.
Emmett Till is not widely known by my students, and I didn't know much about him until I got into college. His story echoes the lynchings of the south, again punctuated by those grainy black and whites, a crowd of unidentified white men surrounding their catch. His story is an effect of what Atticus Finch calls, the "evil assumption" that all Negroes cannot be trusted around white women. I first saw this in the lives of some of my friends and their parents. "What would your parents do if you dated a black guy?" "Kill me," was always their response. (Jokingly, my mom always told my sister that if her black boyfriend looked anything like Eddie Murphy, so be it.) I also witnessed this through my own family. My step-father's had several wounds from his sisters dating outside their family's comfort zone. Because one husband was abusive and left his kids, all black men were not to be trusted.
This irrational fear harked back to the film "Birth of a Nation." D.W. Griffith's cinematic addition to what was then a masterworks in film making was peppered with a story line where the KKK were the heroes. In stilted black and white, accompanied by the simple melodramatic composition of all silent films, were images of men in blackface. Black faced men who perpetuated the stereotypes and biases I was familiar with almost 80 years later in Houston. Black people eat fried chicken. They're lazy, they're scary and good white folk seen to be saved from them.
The young Emmett Till, brash and free spirited, didn't understand this irrational fear still existed in Money, Mississippi. The details are still murky, but the story is he reportedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant. Fearful she was getting a gun in retaliation, Emmett and his cousins left Bryant's store in a hurry and didn't say a word to Mose Wright, Emmett's uncle. When JW Milam and Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, arrived several days later in the middle of the night and kidnapped Emmett, it must have been a shock that many blacks feared would happen to any one of them. In fact, when Mose gathered a search party to look for the missing Emmett, who had already been killed, they looked down by the river in the familiar place blacks always searched when a loved one was missing.
The story of the trial is infamous too. Sheriff Strider, the archetype of all backwoods, southern racist cops. The ironic city motto of Sumner, where the trial was held, that read, "A great place to raise a boy." The town where black men were afraid to answer news reporter's questions about Milam and Bryant's innocence. Sheriff Strider, who hustled the members of the Chicago media and the NAACP into a small room and said, "Hello, niggers," each day.
But the story switches to the courage of Emmett's mother, Mamie Till. A mom who had only the ring on her son's finger to identify her son's body. She requested that his viewing be an open casket. It was reported that almost 1 in every 5 people had to be escorted from the grotesque scene of Emmett's bludgeoned face. But the visceral scene proved important for many in the community and the nation as well. "We were under attack," many thought, and here was the proof.
Emmett Till's death and aftermath did not occur in a time of social media we have now. The photo was jarring enough for all America to awaken to something that was beginning to brew. Just a few months later, Rosa Parks refused to move on that Alabama bus and the rest is history. There was no one that filmed Rosa's defiance with a camera phone. In Selma, and in protests that turned violent in Birmingham, all of America was privy to what many African-Americans knew all along, that the system of segregation had serious flaws.
Today, there are budding journalist with an eye on each arrest. How many fugitives will be shot when the hand that arrests them reaches for their handgun instead of a tazer? Ferguson erupts. Now Baltimore. There is an underlying issue that gets pushed aside through the images of looting and burning cars. The investigation into the police tactics in Ferguson unearthed a justice system made to foster a revolving door of burden on the citizens, predominantly African-Americans. Harassment, tickets, arrests. During my stint with the court system here in Columbus with my expired license, I did not see an overflow of black men in court. It was about 50/50. But imagine this is part of your life in the town you reside. Always looking in the rear view mirror, worried that eye contact with a police officer will give you away (indeed, Freddie Gray's "crime" was running away from law enforcement after a similar confrontation).
Is the justice system stacked? That's today's open debate. But the same irrational fear whites once had for blacks has now been turned. Do we have an irrational fear of cops?
There's been a video making the rounds from the streets of Baltimore, of a mom who is corralling her son in an effort to remove him from the protests. She's yelling and hitting him upside the head. Would Mamie Till have done the same to any of her kin on the streets of Chicago after her son's death? Mamie took a different stand. She continued to speak for the NAACP and took her case all the way to the steps of the white house. President Eisenhower and J. Edgar Hoover did not even act, nor speak on the injustice of that case. Similar feelings run through my mind when our president, a black man, refuses to get on the world's stage and condemn these very acts of riots (he finally did just today).
The media wonders why there is so much anger in the streets of black America. These youth are all searching for something lost years ago--the absence of their fathers. The brave men and women of the Civil Right's Era were moved by the injustices, yes, but don't forget the movement of God. The youth of yesterday attended church, they organized in church. How can you rightfully discuss Martin Luther King Jr. without bringing up the importance of one's faith.
I'm not sure how much faith these young men have anymore. With their father's gone, their mother's exhausted, where can they turn to when the pulls of life turn desperate? The scenes are so strikingly different. The march on Selma, arm in arm in harmony. In Ferguson, a line of men screaming obscenities and launching homemade molotovs. In one scene in Birmingham, dogs attack protesters, others are showered from a fire hose. In Baltimore, a line of armor wielding cops being peppered with stones. The color photos I search for on the internet for our essays this week seem so surreal. I almost expect them to be in black and white, a flash from the past that reminds us all of our sordid histories, the way we turned from justice. Sadly, they will be the pictures for a new generation. How will my grandkids look back on today's events? I doubt it will be as simple as black and white.
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