To enact change in the world, we must protest
AMERICA HAS BEEN plunged into another Emmett Till moment of racial reckoning and soul searching. The protests and acts of civil disobedience currently roiling the nation will continue to flare like California wildfires. They must. This nation was built on protest.
The excruciating images of the final tortured moments of George Floyd, an African American who died in police custody on a Minneapolis street last month, must continue to fuel a national fury. The nature of Floyd’s death forces America to confront an immoral reality: the United States remains stubbornly committed to a long-standing practice of violent and often lethal policing of African Americans.
Till would have turned 79 next month had he lived. Instead, the 14-year-old black boy was lynched in 1955. A native of Chicago, Till was visiting relatives in rural Mississippi when he committed the capital crime of whistling at a white grocery store clerk. Hours later, he paid in blood.
After Till’s body was recovered from the Tallahatchie River three days later, a nation was stunned when pictures of his horribly disfigured face were published. When a mortician offered to “touch up” the corpse for the funeral, Till’s mother refused. She demanded that the nation—and the world—see what racial hatred looked like up close. A mother’s protest helped spark a civil rights movement.
“You must continuously tell Emmett’s story until man’s consciousness is risen. Only then will there be justice for Emmett Till,” she was famously quoted as saying.
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https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/2020/06/to-enact-change-world-we-must-protest/?cmpid=org=ngp::mc=crm-email::src=ngp::cmp=editorial::add=History_20200608&rid=FB26C926963C5C9490D08EC70E179424
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