nursing an exhaustion and (it tasted wonderful!) red wine fueled hangover on Sunday afternoon, I finally faced up to watching a recent Netflix arrival: The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. I won't reiterate the facts here--we all heard about it, especially if you grew up in the South. (I 'spose suburban North Texas isn't really the "South" but hey, it's south of here.)The benefit of this documentary is that it helped re-open this case, where 2 white men were found not guilty of torturing, brutally beating, and, finally, killing 14 year old Till because he "wolf-whistled" at a white woman in Money, Mississippi, in 1955. The reason I would recommend it is that about halfway through it, without any stupid advisory warning about "graphic images", the filmmakers show us Till's swollen, disfigured face. The face his mother had to gaze upon when she got the body back to their home in Chicago. I guess I did not remember that she chose to have an open casket funeral for her son so that everyone could see what had been done to him and I had never seen a photograph of his face. It's disturbing beyond description. You can find the image on the internet and should see it for yourself. As we wander and scramble through our busy lives, I wonder again why I don't dedicate more of my own time to being truly angry about this and the stuff like this that is still happening. How have we not evolved out of this cruelty yet?
1 comment:
Till's funeral (and amazing mother) are also featured prominently in the great PBS doc "Eyes on the Prize," which was recently rebroadcast.
And the sad answer to your concluding question is and likely always will be: No.
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