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emmett till
The Conversation Black Parents Perfected—That All Families Now Need
Recent violent and fatal encounters involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement have forced families across lines of race, ethnicity, and immigration status to confront the reality of their precarious existence in America—and start talking to their children about how to stay safe.
Feb 28, 2026
It is 1955 and the hot Mississippi sun is blazing overhead. Miles away in Chicago a Black mother is having a conversation with her 14-year-old son. She tries to impress upon him the often subtle but dangerous realities of what it means to be Black in America, and how one misinterpretation, one lie, could result in his death. That boy is Emmett Till, and in her memoir, Death of Innocence, Mamie Till-Mobley reflects on “The Talk” she delivered to her son before his historically tragic trip to Mississippi.
This version of The Talk dates back to American chattel slavery and has been passed down for generations in Black families, shaped by ongoing racial violence and unequal treatment. But recent violent and fatal encounters involving US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have forced families across lines of race, ethnicity, and immigration status to confront the reality of their precarious existence in America—and start talking to their children about how to stay safe. Black families’ experience on how to have these conversations is now, tragically, something many families can learn from.
The Talk has always carried more than one meaning. For many families, it refers to the conversation about the birds and the bees, the discussion parents have with their children about dating, puberty, and sex in an effort to prevent teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. That version of The Talk is often framed as universal.
But for Black families, The Talk has long meant something entirely different. In addition to conversations about puberty, Black parents have used The Talk to prepare their children for the realities of race and how to stay safe in a society shaped by racism.
In this modern era The Talk is undergoing another round of evolution. It is no longer just a Black conversation. It is fast becoming an American conversation.
Both conversations typically happen around the onset of puberty, but only some families have had the privilege of needing just one version of The Talk. In a 2024 study conducted by Dr. Conial Caldwell, Black fathers reflected on whether other communities also have The Talk. The consensus was clear: Some groups have long had the luxury of avoiding it, while others have their own versions shaped by identity, history, and perceived vulnerability. However, that distinction is beginning to blur.
Because of recent ICE actions, many immigrant and mixed-status families are foregoing everyday liberties out of fear, like grocery shopping and going to work. In Connecticut, Minneapolis, and other locations school attendance stymied by ICE-related anxiety is widespread. Recent deaths linked to encounters with federal immigration enforcement, including those of Keith Porter Jr., Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Preti in Minnesota, have sparked national outrage and renewed scrutiny of ICE’s training practices, accountability, and use of force, including against white Americans. These incidents follow the detention of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos by ICE agents, showing that not even young children are safe.
Families who once felt insulated from normalized and state sanctioned violence against Black Americans, are now asking the same questions Black parents have asked for generations: How do we keep our children safe? How do we prepare them for interactions with law enforcement? What do we say and when?
The fathers in Caldwell’s study offered simple but powerful guidance.
Parents should have The Talk early and revisit it often, adjusting the conversation as children grow. As children grow and become part of new environments outside of the home, so too do the risks of danger increase. Parents’ protective conversations should reflect their children’s developmental stage and level of maturity. At the same time, they should be mindful of social media and television, recognizing that children are exposed to images and narratives that shape their understanding of safety and belonging. Social media has become of one the major spaces of youth interactions; thus, the risk of exposure is not only heighted but as consistent as their internet access. Beyond one’s immediate family, communities must work together to protect all children, not just their own. And children must be consistently reminded that their lives have value, regardless of how they look or where they come from.
From chattel slavery to emancipation, from reconstruction and the civil rights period to post civil rights, The Talk has had to respond to harsh prevailing societal realities for Black Americans. In this modern era The Talk is undergoing another round of evolution. It is no longer just a Black conversation. It is fast becoming an American conversation. So, just as Mamie Till-Mobley may have agonized over her words as she gave her son some of her final attempts at guidance and protection, parents across the USA are weighing their words and conversations in their attempts to safeguard their children.
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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.
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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 told NPR 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 on Wednesday, 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 told The 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."
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