The Ghost of Emmett Till

The Ghost of Emmett Till 

Recently, I was listening to NPR on my drive home from doing some errands. A news story came on

A news story came on about the murder of Emmett Till. For those of you who do not know, Emmett Till was a 14 year old boy who was visiting Mississippi in 1955. He was abducted, beaten, tortured and then shot. His remains were then desecrated. His body was then chained to an industrial fan blade stolen from a local cotton gin, and dumped into the Tallahatchie river. Later recovered, his mother insisted on there being an open casket funeral. She wanted people to see the horror of murder. All these years later, NPR interviewed a man who had been a prosecutor back when Till's murderers were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury. They later confessed in an interview for Look magazine. The man, even now, all these years later, still stuck to the Official White Version of the events, saying Till got what he had coming to him, for being uppity and flirting with a white girl. The recipient of the alleged unwanted advances later retracted the story, but by then it was too late. Till had been abducted, tortured and killed. The four men to grabbed a 14 year old boy off the street, carried him off and killed him, for the crime of talking to a white woman. Furthermore, the man interviewed said, plaintively, why do they keep playin The Race Card ? Why keep raking it up ? it makes a stink.
I'll tell you why, after the break.

So, why does it matter, bringing up a story like this, and "raking things up" ? 

Why indeed ? The short answer is, it stinks because it's still there, festering under the surface. It's an infected wound on the body politic. Emmett Till may never have been a Nobel Laureate. He might not have cured cancer or solved one of life's great riddles. But we'll never know, will we ?
We'll never know if he would have been a good father. A grandfather. An alcoholic. A genius at computers. Whatever you can imagine a young man becoming, Emmett Till will never do that, because he will not grow up. He won't go to High School. He won't go to trade school or college. Emmett Till's life may have been golden, or it may have been a loss, but we don't know. We cannot know, because 4 men took the law into their own hands and murdered him. Four men who should have been minding their own business instead made it their business to abduct, beat and murder a 14 year old boy. A boy. A boy who just happened to have dark skin. That was his crime, having dark skin. That's all. And today we see shootings carried out by young white men against people who are not white. Four weeks ago, a young white man walked into a Wal-Mart store and opened fire with a semiautomatic rifle. When he was done, a total of 46 people were down, and 22 of them would never get up again. This man is the spiritual descendant of the white men who abducted and murdered Emmett Till. They killed Till not to punish him for the effrontery of speaking to a white woman, but to terrorize the black community in Mississippi so that they would remain under the boot of White Supremacy. So that they would not disrupt the power structure in Mississippi. So that the non-whites would permit the minority Whites to continue running things, Just like it had always been done. Just like it will be done until the non-whites decide for once and for all that the Old Order has to go. That it's no longer "okay" to be called "Boy". That segregated schools -- a thing that most of the country has largely got rid of -- need to go. (the Whites accomplished re-segregating simply by establishing private schools with entry requirements that would exclude non-whites. ) Whites, for their part, need to clear away the cobwebs that are the refractory sentiment. They need to throw racial prejudice onto the scrapheap where it belongs. We together need to push away the old ways where a person who is not white needs to run for their lives after sunset. We need to remember Emmett Till because he is a symbol of how ugly we can be. We should cleave to the Angels of our better nature. Move forward into a future where no one is judged by the color of their skin, and where, to paraphrase Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.  everyone is judged by the content of their character.