Power of Images: Amy Goodman on Emmett Till

Amy Goodman - Host, Democracy Now!

I go back in time to talk about what should be done, to the story of Emmett Till. Emmet Till was a fourteen-year-old AfricanAmerican boy in the summer of 1955, lived in Chicago with his mother Mamie. She sent him down to Money, Mississippi, for the summer to be with family and he ended up being lynched there. White mob, white family, not even clear exactly what happened but they said he "wolf whistled" at a white woman and he ends in up in the bottom of the Tallahatchie river. He's dragged out of bed, he's tortured, he's killed. And his mother Mamie Till had his body sent back to Chicago and she did something very defiant, very brave. She said he wanted, she wanted his casket open for all to see. She wanted his casket open for the wake and the funeral. For the world to see the ravages of racism. The brutality of bigotry. And so, thousands streamed by his casket. I just was in Detroit speaking and an older African American man, white hair, white beard, came up to me afterwards and said, "My father took me there. I was twelve years old. Emmet was fourteen. I'll never forget that open casket, seeing Emmett's head," he said. Well, Jet magazine and other black publications took photographs, and they were published. And they were indelibly seared into the conscience and history of this country. Mamie Till, Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till's mother, had something very important to teach the press of today. Show the pictures. Show the images.