Messages 2010
African American Affirmation.
August 30th, 2010.
Berkeley, California
Received by FAB
I am here, Emmett Till.
Yes, I stood up to my white oppressors, and I would do it again, and again. They couldn’t talk to me that way. They had no right to. I watched what happened after my death, and it pleased me very much.
Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African American boy from Chicago, Illinois, who was murdered at the age of 14 in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the state’s Delta region, after reportedly whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, at a small grocery store where Emmett and his cousins had bought some candy. Bryant was the wife of the store owner, Roy Bryant.
The murder of Emmett Till was noted as one of the leading events that motivated the American Civil Rights Movement. The main suspects, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were acquitted by a jury of twelve white men, but later admitted they were responsible for the beating, torture, and murder of the black fourteen-year old and wanted to “make an example out of him.”
Till’s mother insisted on a public funeral service, with an open casket with the intent of showing the world the brutality of the killing: Till had been beaten and an eye gouged out, before he was shot through the head and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was discovered and retrieved from the river three days later. (Source: Wikipedia)