July 30, 2016
Yesterday was Emmett Till’s birthday, his 76th had he not been brutally beaten and drowned by white men, when he was only 14. It was 1955, I believe, and he was visiting the South from his home in the North. His mother warned him to be careful. But he acted like a silly black 14 year old in a seriously white-colored-hating town in Mississippi, and got lynched.
Coincidentally today’s class assignment was John Edgar Wideman’s “Father Along”, which chronicles Emmett Till’s trial, the one which his mother, Mamie, attended to watch her dead son get lynched again as the jury acquitted her son’s murderers. Before the son, his father, Louis Till, was hanged for treason in Italy, a fact revealed to the jury, despite being classified information illegally released and improperly introduced in evidence.
In class, we discussed how race is myth and power that perpetuates the myth. Wideman claims that race will disappear when we stop talking about it, but not just talking, also seeing, stop accepting the lies of implanted cultural inheritances that segregate races in the minds of generations.
And then I glimpsed a small clip of the DNC today, the part when a group of black mothers banded together to grieve and fight for awareness–of guns and violence and black youth, the sons they lost to guns and violence. Trayvon Martin’s mother spoke. That’s who I caught speaking in the five minutes I was able to snatch at work in between customers.
I’m not sure one Presidency can change that, meaning America’s racism, America’s segregation in the minds of its people. Though those women, and many other people maintain hope that the nation will inch its way toward a racially free society. I do too.