Reflection 5: Immersion
A sign stands outside of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse memorializing Emmett Till. (Emmett Till Interpretive Center)
As the old adage goes, history repeats itself. The point of memorializing history is to learn from it so that we don’t see reruns of the same mistakes.
Emmett Till, a young Black boy from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi, was only fourteen years old when he was brutally kidnapped and lynched in 1955. He had been accused of whistling at a white woman in a store.
Thirty-four years prior, Dick Rowland, a young Black teenager, had been arrested for being in the elevator with a white woman when she screamed. A headline story accused him of sexual assault (which police later concluded was false) and the event triggered the Tulsa Race Massacre, one of the deadliest riots in U.S. history.
History repeats itself. Innocent Black people are targeted, brutalized, arrested unlawfully and killed again and again and again.
The New York Times’ virtual reality documentary “Remembering Emmett Till” explores the town where Till was murdered.
According to the documentary, Till’s mother held an open casket funeral and allowed his almost unrecognizable body to be photographed. It’s as if she was trying to say, “Look at what they did to my son. Burn this image into your brain. Remember him.”
“I know that his life can’t be returned,” Till’s mother said, “but I hope that his death will surge and restart a movement.”
Outside of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse, there’s a sign on one side marking it the place of Till’s murder trial. On the other side, there’s a Confederate monument from 1913 — Jim Crow era — an eerie looming symbol of the racism that led to the murder of Emmett Till.
What history should we really be paying tribute to? We should be remembering the death of an innocent boy and the countless lives lost of those who look like him, not remembering the life of a Confederate figure.
History repeats itself. The scene of the courthouse parallels our present America: racism still stands while we mourn the deaths and remember the lives of Rayshard Brooks, Daniel Prude, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson and countless other Black people who have been killed as a result.