There are many scenes seared into my childhood memories of my father, my mother, relatives and people in our community involved in some racist interactions that could have cost their lives.  As a witness, young though I was, I understood the danger that racist Whites represented and I knew how brave my family and other community members were to oppose wrong, to speak us for themselves and to refuse to accept being called the “n” word or any type of discrimination.

The murder of Emmitt Till also personally impacted my life, even though I wasn’t born when he was abducted and brutally beaten and murdered in 1955 in Money, Mississippi.  As a child from the south, I heard his story growing up.  I remember my grandfather Woodie shaking his head and murmuring, “They should have never killed that boy like that, he was a child.”  I read about Till in high school in Jet and Ebony magazines, but it was in graduate school that I discovered that Black poets around the world wrote and published poetry protesting the murder of Till.

It wasn’t just that this brutal murder shocked and galvanized people to action, but it is that his mother decided that the world would see what they did to her son.  Unfortunately, it was nothing new for Black men, women and children to be lynched in America, especially when people, laws and movement were determined by race and Black was considered an inferior race.  I wrote one of my Master’s thesis papers on Emmitt Till and the Poets of African Descent.

Till, affectionately called Bobo, lived in Chicago and went down to Mississippi to stay with his uncle and cousins for the summer.  He whistled at the White store owner’s wife while she stood outside the grocery store.  The cousins immediately grabbed Till and took him home. They did not tell their uncle and when several days passed, they forgot all about breaking the strict, southern social norm, which Blacks, especially males, never interacted with White women.

Later when the men, led by the husband and his brother, took Till from his uncles’ home in the night, the Uncle asked them to take him instead and they refused. Someone fishing discovered the body days later. Beaten and bloated, it had a heavy cotton gin fan wrapped with barbed wire around Till, but the body still floated up. The only way family could recognized the body is by his father’s ring on his finger.

The Mississippi sheriff tried to bury his body in Mississippi. His mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, said no; she wanted her son buried in Chicago.  The sheriff made the uncle sign papers that the funeral would have a closed casket.  She held an open casket funeral.  When Mamie Till-Mobley heard he had been abducted, she telephoned everyone she could think of in Chicago, including the recently elected Mayor Richard Daley, and the Illinois Governor.  She contacted the Black press and so began her relentless campaign to let the world see what racism did to her boy.  Her decision changed the trajectory of the Civil Rights struggle and sped up the fight for freedom.  Three months later, the Montgomery bus boycott began and for the rest of his life, Rev. Dr. King Jr would use the Till murder as an example of “the evil of racial injustice,” preaching about “the crying voice of a little Emmett Till, screaming from the rushing waters in Mississippi.”

Emmett Till’s mother is finally coming to the big screen. “Women of the Movement,” which airs on ABC tells the story of Mamie Till-Mobley and her continued pursuit of justice for her son, Emmett.  After Till’s death in 1955, Till-Mobley spent the rest of her life committed to fighting for civil and human rights for all Black men, women, and families. She died in 2003 at age 81.  Rev. Dr. King Jr., Mrs. Mamie Till-Mobley, and all of that generation left us a legacy of strength and resilience that honors them and inspires us.