This video still gives me chills.. Emmett Till’s mother describing the first time she saw his body. (WARNING: very graphic description)
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after flirting with a white woman. His killers were acquitted of the crime and later admitted to the murder. Till’s mother had an open-casket funeral to display the injustice, helping spur the civil rights movement.
A young black man – not even a man, but a child – whistles at a white woman and is murdered for it. His body is left unrecognizable. Not just in the sense of his identity, but he didn’t even look like a human being anymore. They brutalized him so badly, they stripped him of his humanity.
And they were acquitted for it.
Till’s mother was criticized for not crying enough on the stand. One of the prosecutors, in his closing statement, said what Emmett Till did was wrong. Later in life, some of the jurors acknowledged that they knew Bryant and Milam were guilty, but didn’t believe life imprisonment or the death penalty was a fitting punishment for a white person who had killed a black child. In 1985, one of the murderers said “if Emmett Till hadn’t got out of line, it probably wouldn’t have happened to him.”
And today we learned that he didn’t even do anything.
Emmett Till was murdered for being black. It wasn’t because he was poor. It’s because he was black. And not nearly enough is being done to stop something like that from ever happening again.
I remember pain I felt when I heard about this as a child. I remember the anger I felt as an adult after seeing the photos.
That poor baby and his fam. Bless his strong mother. That was so tough to watch…But I feel like it’s necessary. Gotta know our history. #BlackHistory
I wonder how this gracious lady managed to live after that, crushed by this evil.
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