This generation’s Emmett Till moment

The saddest and most enduring whistle in the history of the United States was pushed through the lips of a 14-year-old boy from up North who was unschooled in the ways down South and didn’t know how deadly it could be.

Years after those lips had been broken and silenced, the whistle from the Delta would be heard on dark, lonely roads and in the nightmares of African American children and adults.

The whistle would be a sibilant call to a slowly mobilizing young movement, and it would be heard in Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma and across the nation.

Rosa Parks would hear it and remain seated on a bus.

In Louisville, a 13-year-old who would change his name to Muhammad Ali, shocked after seeing a picture of the boy’s corpse, derailed a diesel engine from the railroad tracks.

On Aug. 24, 1955, a Chicago teenager named Emmett Till visiting relatives in Money, Miss., went into Bryant’s Grocery and Meat and may have whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who also claimed he grabbed her around the waist and used profanity.

On the night of Aug. 28, her husband, Roy Bryant, and brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, kidnapped, beat and tortured Till for hours before shooting him and dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound cotton gin tied around his neck with barbed wire.

Bryant and Milam were acquitted but later confessed to the murder in interviews for which they were paid. A few years ago, Carolyn Bryant confessed to lying about Till grabbing her.

The boy’s lynching was a transformative event in what would become the civil rights movement, one to which the killing of George Floyd and the protests it’s inspired has been compared. It’s the visuals of both deaths that heightened their horror, captured the barbaric injustice and magnified their impact on the country.

For Floyd, it was watching his death over 8 minutes and 46 seconds.

For Till, it was “The Photo.” Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, wanted the world to see what “they” had done to her son, so she opened the casket for mourners and for Jet magazine to photograph.

The famously gruesome picture in the black news weekly showed what was a 14-year-old boy in a casket, but he looked like a monster, so horribly had he been beaten. It is a picture seared into the minds of African Americans. Told to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, Rosa Parks said she thought of Emmett and remained seated.

But it is the Emmett Till generation of African Americans, his peers who became the vanguard of the civil rights movement, who were traumatized by his murder. Ali said, “I realized that this could just as easily been a story about me or my brother.”

In “Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement,” civil rights leader and U.S. Rep. John Lewis wrote that Till’s murder left him “shaken to the core.”

In 2011, on the 50th anniversary of the integrated bus rides that challenged segregated bus terminals, Freedom Riders gathered in Money, Miss., to pay homage to Till. One of them, Joyce Ladner, said, “Nothing frightened me more and others of my generation than when Emmett Till was killed. I was 12 years old at the time and remember seeing the picture of his bloated body in Jet magazine. Everyone I knew in SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) was galvanized by it. We’re the Emmett Till Generation.”

Before Till, racial violence against African Americans in the South was covered exclusively by the black press. The trial of Bryant and Milam was the first such racial crime to attract the national white press.

The impact of Emmett Till’s death on the civil rights movement and his generation is undeniable, which makes it even more remarkable to say it doesn’t come close to the immediate impact of George Floyd’s death. The key word is “immediate.”

After the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott, the civil rights movement lost some energy before building momentum through the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, the Freedom Rides in 1961, the Birmingham Campaign in 1963, Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 and the Selma Campaign in 1965, leading to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

We don’t know how long this George Floyd movement will last or what will be the full range of its impact. But never in our history have protests arisen so quickly, been sustained for this long, and so quickly shifted the mindset and culture of the nation and even the world.

Emmett Till’s whistle was a haunting, clarion call to one generation.

George Floyd’s last breaths are inspiring a new generation.

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