The Blood of Emmett Till(74)

On November 17, 2014, as these protests spread across the country, a former chair of SNCC stood in the rain on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol with a shovel. In an orchard of umbrellas Representative John Lewis helped plant an American sycamore in honor of a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was murdered almost sixty years earlier. In his 1998 memoir, Lewis writes that when he was fifteen, “and at the edge of my own manhood just like him,” he had been “shaken to the core” by the lynching of Emmett Till.12 Among those wielding shovels with Lewis were both U.S. senators from Mississippi and Eric Holder, the first African American U.S. attorney general.

“Even today, the pain from this unspeakable crime, this unspeakable tragedy, still feels raw,” Holder declared, but the tree would become Emmett Till’s “living memorial, here at the heart of our Republic, in the shadow of the United States Capitol.” Till perished senselessly and far too soon, the attorney general said, but “it can never be said that he died in vain. His tragic murder galvanized millions to action.”13 After Holder spoke, reporters asked him about the relationship between Emmett Till and the contemporary racial conflagrations in Ferguson and elsewhere. “The struggle goes on,” replied Holder. “There is an enduring legacy that Emmett Till has left us with that we still have to confront as a nation.”14

Decades after his death Emmett continues to be a national metaphor for our racial nightmares. And difficult though it is to bear, his story can leave us reaching for our better angels and moving toward higher ground. By suffering comes wisdom, the ancient Greeks tell us, and Mamie Bradley’s decision to take history in her hands and help build a movement distills that harder wisdom and leaves it in our own. “The struggle of humanity against power,” writes Milan Kundera, “is always the struggle of memory against forgetting.”15

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America is still killing Emmett Till, and often for the same reasons that drove the violent segregationists of the 1950s and 1960s. Yes, many things have changed; the kind of violence that snatched Till’s life strikes only rarely. A white supremacist gunman slaughtering nine black churchgoers in a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2014, however, reminds us that the ideology of white supremacy remains with us in its most brutal and overt forms. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country,” the murderer said as he fired round after round into his African American victims. He could have been quoting Judge Thomas Brady’s 1954 Black Monday or a Reconstruction-era political pamphlet. White America’s heritage of imagining blacks as fierce criminals, intent on political and sexual domination, as threatening bodies to be monitored and controlled, has never disappeared. These delusions have played a compelling and bloody role for centuries. The historian Stephen Kantrowitz writes that the murders in Charleston are “an expression and a consequence of American history—a history that the nation has hardly reckoned with, much less overcome.”16

Evidence that the past is still with us is abundant. Racial hatred drove a group of suburban white teenagers to beat and murder James Craig Anderson, a black man selected at random in Jackson, Mississippi, on June 26, 2011. One teenager yelled “White power” as he returned from the assault, and several of the others shouted racial epithets. Federal and state courts charged ten of the youths with the murder and with a series of similar attacks over a period of months. The judges sentenced one of them to two life terms and the others to terms ranging from eighteen and a half months to four years.17 Denying that such violence is common, the Hinds County district attorney said in 2011, “I do think because of the political and economic structure and the re-engineering of society, it appears that certain parts of the country and Mississippi feel their culture is under attack.”18

Certainly politics in the United States in the first two decades of the twenty-first century reflect, as the nominal gains of the civil rights movement continue to make their claims on our society—most notably the election of America’s first African American president—that many white citizens feel that something has been and is being taken from them. Nearly forty years of stagnating wages and growing inequality have done nothing to ease their anxieties. Many, too, are afraid and seek to build walls rather than bridges between our increasingly divided nations, separate, unequal, and often hostile; immigration has rendered our predicaments increasingly complex—and, for many, more frightening. Most African American children grow up in a world far more impoverished, bleak, and confined than their white counterparts. Their families fall behind white families in virtually every measure of well-being: wealth and income levels, wages, unemployment rates, health and mortality figures, levels of incarceration, and crime victimization rates. And their often lethally divergent experiences with law enforcement only mirror what Maya Angelou calls “These Yet to Be United States.”19

America is still killing Emmett Till, but often by means less direct than bludgeons and bullets. The most successful killers of African American youth are poverty, resegregated and neglected public schools, gang violence, and lack of economic opportunities. Violence and exploitation against black women scar whole communities, and mothers still bear the burden of burying black sons. In many inner cities the drug trade is the only enterprise that is hiring, while the national unemployment rate for young black men is well over twice that for other young men. The so-called war on drugs successfully targets young African American men, even though blacks and whites use and sell illicit drugs at roughly the same rate. The enormous incarcerated and judicially supervised population of the United States has become disproportionately a population of color. Writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, “A society that protects some people through a system of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.”20