Emmett Till’s Open Casket

TW: The last page of this carousel contains the photograph Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, wanted the world to see.

After thinking about the lure of true crime for our generation, the story of Emmett Till’s funeral (as I read in “Rebellious Mourning”) has been bouncing around my mind.

We all know that basics of the horror that 14-year-old Emmett Till endured. After wrongfully being accused of wolf whistling a white woman while buying candy from a store in Money, Mississippi, Till was kidnapped from his bed, tortured, disfigured, shot, wrapped in barbed wire, attached to a fan and drowned. When his body made it home to Chicago, his mother nearly passed out at the sight of what two white men had done to her baby. She made a decision that changed the face of American Civil Rights Movement.

Mamie Till-Mobley wanted the world to witness “what they did to my baby”. In interviews, she expressed feeling her grief would be carried by all who witnessed the horror of her son’s mutilation. Till-Mobley could extend her grief to the soul of a nation and instead of shouldering her burden alone, it would be carried by all of America. And in many, many ways her wisdom did exactly that (see the photo of the mourners gathered to witness the funeral of Emmett Till).

Not all true crime podcast/series/movies/books are published with the express permission of the mourning family. And not all are done with the wisdom to demand a nation witness brutality and injustice. But perhaps we are collectively reckoning with the horrors of the world we live in and asking one another to witness the burden of what we carry?

The important thing to note here, IMO: when brutality, injustice and grief become entertainment, we have strayed from our compassion and integrity.

We can grow together in our grief. As Till-Mobley taught us, we can refuse shame and share the brutality we grieve. To witness with heart and thought requires we hold ourselves accountable: am I making someone else’s grief my entertainment or am I educating myself to stand in solidarity?