Last night, I joined a friend and viewed the documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. I won't sugarcoat it, this film was hard to watch. As a white woman, born and raised in Texas, I live with ancestoral guilt deep in the roots of my family tree for the way black people were and are treated in this country.
Today, I am reminded that I grew up in a segregated town and our books and education were censored by the School Board, the PTA, our parents, etc... I am so angry that at my age, I had never heard of Emmett Louis Till and the role his murder played in sparking the civil rights movement. Just one more thing we weren't taught in school. As I watched the film, I saw too quickly the relevance to today...how the murder of a young black boy in Money, Mississippi 50 years ago was so similar to the murder of a young gay man in Laramie, Wyoming not too long ago.
I suppose if I had stayed in that small town, married right after high school, had a pack of kids like girls were supposed to, the life of Emmett Louis Till wouldn't have meant a thing to me, but I didn't stay and his life and the way he died is important to me. What gave the adults in my life the right to filter history?
What else do I not know? How do I begin to teach myself the things censored out of my life?
I intend to find out.
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After responding to your email without Googling, I then rushed to find out who he was. While I didn't know the name, I knew the story. But not from school. I saw a piece of multimedia artwork at the Bayou City Arts Festival this year that depicted the store where the incident happened. The artist had been commissioned by Morgan Freeman to do the piece or he had bought it or something. Anyway, the art was amazing in that the artist adds color by hand to photos she's taken. The art was all from Mississippi and for the most part reflective of the African American culture there. I was certainly surprised to learn that the middle aged blonde woman who was sharing the stories with me was the artist. She lives and works in this community. We definitely have had information filtered through the years but the collaborative nature of this work gave me some degree of hope that we have experienced some progress.
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