{"id":9158,"date":"2023-08-03T16:41:40","date_gmt":"2023-08-03T16:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/?p=9158"},"modified":"2023-08-03T16:41:40","modified_gmt":"2023-08-03T16:41:40","slug":"preserving-a-mother-and-sons-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/2023\/08\/03\/preserving-a-mother-and-sons-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Preserving a Mother and Son\u2019s Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Ben Jealous<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By Ben Jealous<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

At the heart of the story that President Biden preserved last week by creating our newest national monument are a mother and son, Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s especially moving for me because so much of my understanding of what the Tills endured and why their story remains essential today comes from my own mom\u2019s experiences.<\/p>\n

Like Emmett, she was in her early teens in 1955 and growing up in West Baltimore. The ritual he was taking part in by traveling from Chicago to Mississippi that summer was a universal one for Black kids living in destinations of the Great Migration, one that still happens today.<\/p>\n

Despite the indignities of Jim Crow, everyone seemed safe when they went back to Grandma\u2019s. Emmett\u2019s torture and lynching by two White men incensed that he whistled at a White woman exposed the vulnerability of Blacks anywhere in South. But rather than cower in response to the brutal murder, my mom and many other young Black people dove deeper into a lifelong struggle for civil rights.<\/p>\n

Mamie Till\u2019s courage to leave open her son\u2019s casket so tens of thousands of mourners in Chicago and the entire world could see his bloated, disfigured corpse galvanized that growing civil rights movement.<\/p>\n

I went to Mississippi in my early 20s to organize opposition to the governor\u2019s plan to close three historically black colleges and turn their campuses into prisons. Nearly 40 years later, I could still see the deep trauma in the souls of Black Mississippians who were Emmett\u2019s age when he died.<\/p>\n

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American civil rights activist Mamie Till (1921-2003), the mother of Emmett Till, sitting with a copy of the Clarion-Ledger newspaper on her lap, in Sumner, Mississippi, 22nd September 1955. Black teenager Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered after he was alleged to have whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. (Photo by Bettmann Archive\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One night, my dad called to ask me to leave the state, if only for a short time. \u201cYour mom keeps having the same nightmare. She hasn\u2019t slept for days,\u201d he told me. \u201cShe keeps seeing your face on Emmett Till\u2019s beaten body.\u201d<\/p>\n

The deep concern apparent in those dreams wasn\u2019t irrational. The rhetorical violence of Jim Crow always accompanied the physical violence of lynchings. That culture persisted. The Jackson newspaper where I later worked got shot up in drive-bys several times in much the same way a plaque at the place where Emmett\u2019s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River has been repeatedly vandalized (with that site now part of the national monument, those crimes will be a federal offense).<\/p>\n

At a time when we see racist rhetoric and dog whistles find renewed popularity, the Tills\u2019 story is a reminder to all of us that there\u2019s a well-worn path from hateful language to violence to the murder of a 14-year-old boy. As it\u2019s been since colonial times, that rhetoric exists to divide poor and working-class people of all races so that they can\u2019t unify around the political and economic interests they all share.<\/p>\n

\"\"
American civil rights activist Mamie Till (1921-2003), the mother of Emmett Till, sitting with a copy of the Clarion-Ledger newspaper on her lap, in Sumner, Mississippi, 22nd September 1955. Black teenager Emmett Till was kidnapped and murdered after he was alleged to have whistled at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. (Photo by Bettmann Archive\/Getty Images)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There are signs of hope, even in Mississippi. In November, the state could elect a populist Democrat as its governor, unseating the Republican heir of the governor I opposed 30 years ago who revived racist rhetoric from that high office.<\/p>\n

We create national parks and national monuments to preserve places, people and ideas that define who we are as a country. Emmett Till should be alive and relatively anonymous in his 80s, not dead from an infamous attack. His mother should be remembered for anything other than making Americans look at just how cruel they can be.<\/p>\n

Being able to visit where Emmett\u2019s body was recovered, where he was eulogized, and where an all-White jury acquitted his killers gives us the chance to measure how far we\u2019ve come and accept how far we\u2019ve left to go.<\/p>\n

Ben Jealous, former president and CEO of the national NAACP, is executive director of the Sierra Club, the nation\u2019s largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of \u201cNever Forget Our People Were Always Free,\u201d published in January.<\/em>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ben Jealous At the heart of the story that President Biden preserved last week by creating our newest national monument are a mother and son, Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett Till. That\u2019s especially moving for me because so much of my understanding of what the Tills endured and why their story remains essential today comes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,17],"tags":[],"wf_post_folders":[186],"class_list":["post-9158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headline","category-local"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9158"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9162,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9158\/revisions\/9162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9158"},{"taxonomy":"wf_post_folders","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.thetruthtoledo.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/wf_post_folders?post=9158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}