There is a movement in the United States to “revise” American History. It’s really kind of sad; there’s a portion of our political “class” that think they are the “victims”. They declare that “woke” teachers (whatever that means) are trying to make their little white children feel guilty over the misdeeds of the American past. So they want American History sanitized, whitewashed (a doubly-loaded term) to protect their children from feeling responsibility for the sins of their fathers.
Emmett Till
Yesterday was the eighty-second anniversary of Emmett Till’s birth. Till was a fourteen year-old Black teen, who in 1955 went from his home in Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi. He committed an “unforgiveable sin” in the then-Jim Crow South. He spoke to a white girl, twenty-one years old, in a store. Maybe he even flirted with her a bit, as fourteen year-old boys sometimes do. For that, he was kidnapped, tortured beyond belief, and then murdered. They found his body in the Tallahatchie River.
The mangled corpse was eventually returned to his mother in Chicago. She made a momentous decision: she determined to have an open casket at his funeral. Mamie Till-Mobley wanted the entire world to see what was done to her son. She got little reaction from the national government. A telegram sent to President Dwight Eisenhower asked him to see that: “(J)ustice is meted out to all persons involved in the beastly lynching of my son.” She never heard back (NYT). Till’s murderers, Roy Bryant and RW Milam, were found “not guilty” by an all-white male Mississippi jury who deliberated for an hour. No one was ever legally held to account.
Photographic Memory
But the media, particularly the Black Press, made sure that her decision impacted the world. More than 100,000 people personally viewed the open casket. And the pictures of Emmett’s body, and Mamie’s reactions, became a national memory.
Why was the excruciating death and funeral of this fourteen year-old so important? It put a true picture of the terrorism that supported Jim Crow segregation in the mind of the Nation. The Till story was a huge step on the road to Civil Rights. It inspired leaders like John Lewis and Rosa Parks to sacrifice. And it became the “face” of segregation, to be joined in the next ten years by the black and white video of Bull Connor’s police dogs attacking demonstrators, the bombed church in Birmingham that killed four little girls, and John Lewis himself beaten by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Within a decade, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were law.
National Monument
Yesterday President Biden officially created a National Monument in honor of Emmett and Mamie Till. The monument spans three sites: the riverside where Emmett’s body was discovered; the Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi where Bryant and Milam were tried; and the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago where the funeral was held. The riverside plaque had to be made bulletproof. The memories of Jim Crow are still strong in the South, sixty-eight years later.
History is history. It isn’t “woke” (whatever that means) or propaganda to be sanitized. It is America’s “story”, the good and the bad. It’s the amazing achievements, including Black people gaining civil rights. And it’s the incredible indecencies, including the lynching of Emmett Till. To ignore, to “whitewash” those facts of our past, to scrub them from the classrooms of Florida, or here in Ohio, is to tell children a different story. It says to those children that they have something to be ashamed of, some unspeakable crime that they can’t know about because THEY somehow bear responsibility.
When the Education Department of Florida tells its teachers to talk about the “benefits” of enslavement to the enslaved, (“…they learned trades like blacksmithing they could use in life”), the kids in the classrooms aren’t stupid. They’ll know that there’s a deep dark secret their teachers, or parents, or state governments, are ashamed of. You see, kids are smart. They can jump on the computer at home and see exactly what happened. It’s easily available: from Emmett Till to the horrors of enslavement in the 1800’s.
More Perfect
In fact, the victimhood that the “white political class” or so afraid of, is exactly what they are creating. Good teachers teach American History in the context and spirit of the Constitution (itself a flawed, racist document). The Constitution begins with the goal; “…in order to become a more perfect union…”. To become more perfect, there were “imperfections”, from the three-fifths compromise to the Fugitive Slave Act, that needed to be “perfected”. And that’s what our Nation did and does. To deny those facts, those imperfections; is telling kids they have something to be ashamed of, that is somehow “their” fault.
It’s not. And a good teacher will let them know it’s not. And just like the bullet holes that still scar the plaque by the river where Emmett’s body was discovered, we are still in the process of becoming “more perfect”. That’s the lesson kids need to learn, and that every good teacher will share; even in Florida, and even here in Ohio. It isn’t about being “woke”. It’s about kids knowing the truth, in context; and teachers knowing kids.
