SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
emmett till
Emmett Till’s Memory Haunts the History Ron DeSantis Wants to Suppress
The painful history of Emmett Till’s lynching and his mother’s remarkable courage is seared into the fabric of this country.
Jul 30, 2023
Emmett Till would have turned 82 on July 25. But he was murdered at 14, on August 28, 1955, dragged from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi, by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. They beat, tortured, and shot Emmett, tied a heavy cotton gin fan to him with barbed wire, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. His bloated, disfigured corpse was discovered several days later.
His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had his body returned to Chicago for his funeral. She insisted on an open casket so the world would see the brutality of bigotry, the ravages of racism. Jet Magazine and other publications carried photos of Emmett Till’s beaten, distended face in his coffin, shocking the world and galvanizing the civil rights movement to defeat Jim Crow.
“I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me,” Mamie Till-Mobley said of her decision. “And if the death of my son can mean something to the other unfortunate people all over the world, then for him to have died a hero would mean more to me than for him just to have died.”
The suggestion that the millions of enslaved people in this country somehow benefited from their enslavement is simply grotesque.
Sixty-eight years later, President Joe Biden formally established the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, signing the proclamation on Emmett Till’s birthday.
Three sites make up the monument: the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ on Chicago’s South Side, where Emmett’s funeral was held; the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Emmett’s two murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury; and the Graball Landing site along the Tallahatchie River, believed to be where Emmett Till’s body was found. The memorial sign at Graball Landing was made bulletproof to withstand the attempts to destroy it. It’s been shot at and vandalized countless times.
The painful history of Emmett Till’s lynching and his mother’s remarkable courage is seared into the fabric of this country. Less than three months later, sickened by the photos of Emmett, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on December 1, 1955, sparking the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The March on Washington in 1963 was held on August 28, the anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder.
Yet there are people now attempting to suppress history and whitewash the systemic racism so central to our nation. Leading the pack of these revisionists is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a Republican presidential candidate. DeSantis first forced the revision of the state’s AP African American Studies curriculum, purging key Black writers, feminists, and references to Black Lives Matter.
Then, last week, the Florida Department of Education released its social studies standards for this school year. The 216-page document states, “Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
Gov. DeSantis was asked to explain this shocking rewrite of the brutal, bloody history of slavery in the United States, while at a campaign stop in Utah:
“They’re probably going to show some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”
Renowned civil rights attorney and Florida resident Ben Crump responded on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It is sickening. It is astonishing that in 2023 we can have a person who is the second in contention for the Republican nomination telling his supporters and his state that he governs that it is going to be mandated now that students in Florida, starting from middle school on, will have to be taught that slavery had positive benefits… It has the potential to cause serious psychological trauma to African American students. We will not stand for it. We will explore every possible legal remedy in the court of law.”
The catalog of atrocities during the centuries-long practice of legal enslavement in the U.S. is long: forced labor, beatings, whipping, torture, rape, murder, the separation of families, the denial and criminalization of education, and more. The suggestion that the millions of enslaved people in this country somehow benefited from their enslavement is simply grotesque.
Of course, many enslaved Africans and their enslaved descendants did learn skills that served them later in life–but these were the skills born of resistance. Harriett Tubman escaped north from Maryland to Philadelphia, and used that hard-earned experience to lead between 11 and 30 dangerous missions to rescue more enslaved people, guiding them to freedom, mostly at night, navigating by the stars.
Legal slavery ended in the United States on December 5, 1865, with the ratification of the 13th Amendment, but its echoes painfully persist to this day. Monuments and memorials are important checks on the whitewashing of history, but strong social movements are the best bulwark against those who would rollback progress.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Desperation, Pain Drives Debate Over Making Photos of Mass Shooting Carnage Public
While some say showing what high-caliber bullets do to children's bodies could spur change, others warn that it risks traumatizing viewers—and re-traumatizing victims and their loved ones.
Jun 03, 2022
Amid the desperation, pain, and frustration in the wake of last month's massacre of 19 children and two teachers at a Texas elementary school, there is renewed debate about whether making public post-mortem images of those killed by AR-15s and other assault weapons would help move the public or lawmakers in the U.S. towards taking real action on gun violence and mass shootings.
"I just cannot believe that Americans in this country would see what these weapons do to our children, our teachers, our community, and that they would stand by and do nothing."
In a society that often averts confronting the bloody and graphic consequences of its domestic and foreign policy choices, many people argue the images of children and others who suffer unimaginbale violence--like Emmett Till's pulverized body, Phan Thi Kim Phuc running naked and napalm-scorched down a South Vietnamese road, or Derek Chauvin's knee slowly choking the life out of George Floyd--have the power to change minds and potentially upend horrific norms.
Trauma surgeon Amy Goldberg believes Americans wouldn't be so numb to gun violence--which claims tens of thousands of U.S. lives each year and is so frequent that only the most horrific mass shootings make national headlines--if they saw what she has seen so many times.
"I think the citizens need to see the destruction of what these military-style weapons do, and that would be pictures," Goldberg toldNPR earlier this week. "And I don't say that lightly. I don't say that with any disrespect, but I'm desperate. All the trauma surgeons need this to stop."
"I just cannot believe that Americans in this country would see what these weapons do to our children, our teachers, our community, and that they would stand by and do nothing," she continued.
"Emmett Till's mom had an open casket, and I'm sure that had some impact on the civil rights movement," Goldberg added. "The napalm girl--you know, those images, brought into our homes during the Vietnam War, I think significantly made change."
In an op-ed published by Common Dreams onWednesday, attorney and social justice activist Mitchell Zimmerman contended that "there is no Second Amendment right to protection from reality."
Noting that "a number of states force women exercising their constitutional right to abortion to look at fetal sonograms before ending their pregnancy," Zimmerman asks, "What if states required anyone who wants to buy an assault rifle, or other semi-automatic weapons, to first see photos or films that show what such weapons do to human bodies?"
"Perhaps some would reconsider whether they really need this kind of weapon to hunt or engage in target shooting," he said.
The debate is not a new one. After 26 students and staff were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Michael Moore asserted that the entire country was complicit in the slaughter due to gun control inaction.
"That is why we must look at the pictures of the 20 dead children laying with what's left of their bodies on the classroom floor," the Bowling for Columbine director said. "Then nothing about guns in this country will ever be the same again."
Moore's remarks sparked widespread outrage.
"There is no Second Amendment right to protection from reality."
"We want to remember the little angels as they were, with their happy expressions and faces and you want to think of the teachers trying to hold them safe and not to see the pictures of their bodies," said the leader of a Newtown parents group who called Moore's idea "a horrendous offense to the families."
Lenny Pozner toldThe New York Times that after his six-year-old son Noah died at Sandy Hook, he considered showing the world photos of what a 5.56mm x 45mm NATO-spec bullet--the type fired by an AR-15--does to a child's body. Made for use in war, such bullets can decapitate a person or leave a body looking "like a grenade went off" inside it, according to trauma surgeon Peter Rhee.
Pozner's first thought was, "It would move some people, change some minds." His next thought, however, was, "Not my kid."
Others believe that those puhsing for making such images public are mistaken and that many people--especially those so steeped in their sacrosanct right to bear arms that no number of dead children would move them--would "stand by and do nothing," as MSNBC opinion columnist Michael A. Cohen wrote on Thursday.
"To be an advocate of near-unfettered access to firearms means shutting out all the evidence that one's selfish demand for practically limitless gun rights is responsible for so much needless suffering," he continued. "It means looking at Robb Elementary, Sandy Hook, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the 2017 mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, or countless other tragedies and deciding that the fetishization of steel and bullets plays no role whatsoever."
"Making public the pictures of the children slaughtered at Uvalde's Robb Elementary School would likely do little to change minds or seriously reshape the debate about guns in America," Cohen conluded. "But allowing people to see such pictures would increase the national trauma around gun violence."
"It's something you never want to see and it's something you don't, you cannot, prepare for. It's a picture that's going to stay in my head forever, and that's where I'd like for it to stay."
Some proponents of showing photos argue that it could come down to the way in which the images are displayed.
"I can imagine some pictures that could be made without dehumanizing the victims that speak to the story of the AR-15, which is a story that has not been seen or fully told," Nina Berman, a documentary photographer, filmmaker, and Columbia journalism professor, told the Times.
"For a culture so steeped in violence, we spend a lot of time preventing anyone from actually seeing that violence," she said. "Something else is going on here, and I'm not sure it's just that we're trying to be sensitive."
There is also the very real possibility that ordinary people viewing images of extraordinary carnage could be traumatized, perhaps even forever. Uvalde coroner Eulalio "Lalo" Diaz, Jr. had the grisly task of idenfitying victims of the Robb Elementary School massacre.
"It's something you never want to see and it's something you don't, you cannot, prepare for," he said of the crime scene. "It's a picture that's going to stay in my head forever, and that's where I'd like for it to stay."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Does America Need an Emmett Till Moment for Mass School Shootings?
Decades ago, photos of Emmett Till’s murdered body galvanized action for civil rights. Could disturbing images do the same for gun control?
Jun 01, 2022
In the days since the Uvalde shooting, media outlets have shared heartbreaking images of the small victims as they were cherished in life. As Americans, we're forced to look into their young, innocent eyes and accept our shame that we failed to protect them.
These disturbing images could ignite the public conscience. They could also be put before gun buyers themselves.
What we haven't seen is what they looked like after their lives were ripped away by AR-15 bullets. Many of the children were reportedly so mutilated they could only be identified by DNA.
It is understandable that a newspaper would be loath to publish such photographs. Most human beings would be loath to look at them.
But in the past, such disturbing images have been used to galvanize action--by forcing us to examine painful realities. When I was a civil rights organizer in the South back in the 1960s, one episode still loomed large in the minds of those who took part in the freedom struggle.
On an August night in 1955, two white men forced their way into a house in rural Mississippi, and abducted a 14-year-old Black child from Chicago named Emmett Till. Emmett had been visiting his Mississippi relatives for the summer.
Earlier that same day, in response to a "dare," Emmett allegedly committed the "crime" of whistling at a white woman in a local grocery store.
The two men kidnapped Emmett and brutally beat and mutilated him before shooting him in the head. Using barbed wire, they tied the dead teenager to a heavy metal fan and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River. His body wasn't taken from the river for another week.
His mother insisted on an open casket funeral. "Everybody needs to know what happened to Emmett Till," she said.
Tens of thousands viewed the body as it was, and Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender ran photographs of the brutalized child. The resulting anger and grief stiffened the determination of the civil rights movement.
Just as children in America today face the reality that a deranged or racist person with an assault rifle can invade their school and take their lives, in 1955 young Black children in the South bore the knowledge that any white man who chose to could pull them out of their home in the night and murder them--and that their society would grant the killer complete impunity.
That bitter knowledge helped mobilize a generation of African Americans and their white allies to fight against segregation and white supremacy. Could the horrific images of the unrecognizable bodies of murdered schoolchildren move more Americans toward confronting our gun problem?
The families of the Uvalde victims will make their own painful decisions regarding the remains of their children. They owe us nothing--it is we who owe them our shamed apologies for failing to protect their children from the now well-known danger of mass murder.
The families of the Uvalde victims will make their own painful decisions regarding the remains of their children. They owe us nothing--it is we who owe them our shamed apologies for failing to protect their children from the now well-known danger of mass murder.
No one can demand the right to use photographs of the victims.
But children aren't the only ones whose bodies have been torn apart and rendered unrecognizable by modern assault weapons. Photographs from both wartime and the home front can doubtless be found to illustrate the costs of so-called "gun rights."
These disturbing images could ignite the public conscience. They could also be put before gun buyers themselves.
A number of states force women exercising their constitutional right to abortion to look at fetal sonograms before ending their pregnancy. What if states required anyone who wants to buy an assault rifle, or other semi-automatic weapon, to first see photos or films that show what such weapons do to human bodies?
Some buyers would no doubt harden their hearts and persuade themselves they must have a weapon of war to defend their homes from an attack by imaginary hordes or other fictitious threats -- or to overthrow a government so tyrannical as to consider regulating firearms.
But perhaps some would reconsider whether they really need this kind of weapon to hunt or engage in target shooting.
There is no Second Amendment right to protection from reality.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular