• Between Seeing and Believing, Memory and Forgetting, Innocence and Guilt
• Danielle L. McGuire (bio)

On May 25, 2020, four Minneapolis police officers arrested George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black father accused of purchasing cigarettes with a fake twenty-dollar bill. Seventeen minutes later, he was dead. Officer Derek Chauvin pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes, squeezing the breath and life out of him. A young Black bystander pleaded with Chauvin and the other police officers present to let Floyd go while filming the gruesome display with her cellphone. Terrified and angered by what she had witnessed, the young woman posted the video to Facebook. “The world needed to see what I was seeing,” she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “Stuff like this happens in silence too many times.”¹ The video went viral, sparking a mass movement for justice for George Floyd and a national reckoning of our country’s racist history and its powerful legacy.

Sixty-five years earlier, another Black woman, Mamie Till-Bradley, wanted the world to see what racist violence in the United States looked like and hoped that a public viewing of the mangled corpse of her fourteen-year-old son, Emmett Till, would spark outrage and change. In the 2018 book, Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till, historian Elliott Gorn fingers the jagged edge of Emmett Till’s life and death and the many aftermaths of his murder, memory, and ultimate martyrdom. Gorn positions Emmett Till’s story in the context of a long history of white supremacist laws, policies, and practices that enabled and justified his murder, acquitted his assailants, and silenced his story. It is this that Gorn ultimately asks readers to see in hopes that a fuller representation of Till’s life and memory will help us better understand our tragic racial past, our combustible present and why Emmett Till’s story is known more today than at any time since 1955. [End Page 1]

The New Yorker published a powerful image connecting these two murders (and many more) more than a half century apart in a June 2020 cover image painted by Kadir Nelson. Superimposed upon George Floyd’s chest are images of Black people killed or brutalized by police or other state-sanctioned forces from slavery through Jim Crow to the present day. In Nelson’s painting, a smiling, cherubic Emmett Till is the symbolic heart of George Floyd; his death representative of the link between a history of lynching and racial terror and the violent policing that led to Floyd’s death; between the NAACP activists involved in the 1920s antilynching campaign, the Civil Rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s and the current Black Lives Matter Movement. While Nelson’s painting is a visual representation of the long history of racial violence and white denial, Eliot Gorn’s work on Till, and Jason Ward’s Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century, flesh out this history in print. Both authors ask us to look harder and more honestly at America’s history of racism, which, as Gorn puts it, is “a shape-shifting demon we must wrestle again and again” (p. 6).

Emmett Till, a native of Chicago, traveled to Money, Mississippi to visit relatives in the summer of 1955 only to be kidnapped and murdered by two white men for allegedly “whistling” at a white woman. His murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, then tied a cotton gin fan around Till’s neck and pushed the boy’s body into the Tallahatchie River, where they expected it to stay. Till’s disappearance would be but one in long and gruesome history of lynching and racial terror in which no one was held accountable. But when some young fisherman saw the bloated body floating atop the river, the fan...

• 在看见与相信之间，记忆与忘记之间，纯真与内Gui之间
• 丹妮尔·麦奎尔（生物）

2020年5月25日，明尼阿波利斯的四名警官逮捕了46岁的黑人父亲乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd），他被指控购买带有伪造的二十美元钞票的香烟。十七分钟后，他死了。军官德里克·乔文（Derek Chauvin）将膝盖压在弗洛伊德（Vloyd）的脖子上超过八分钟，挤压出他的呼吸和生命。一名年轻的黑人旁人在乔文（Chauvin）和其他警察的恳求下，让弗洛伊德（Floyd）在用手机拍摄令人毛骨悚然的显示屏时放手。这位年轻女子对所见所闻感到震惊和愤怒，然后将视频发布到了Facebook。她告诉《明尼阿波利斯星际论坛报》：“世界需要看到我所看到的。” “这样的事情在无声中发生了太多次了。” ^1个 录像带传播迅速，引发了乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）争取正义的大规模运动，并引起了全国对我国种族主义历史及其强大遗产的重视。

65年前，另一个黑人妇女Mamie Till-Bradley希望全世界了解美国的种族暴力行为，并希望公众观看她14岁儿子Emmett Till的残废尸体。 ，会激怒和改变。在2018年出版的《让人们看到：艾米特·蒂尔的故事》中历史学家埃利奥特·高恩（Elliott Gorn）指点了埃米特·提尔（Emmett Till）生死的锯齿边缘，以及他被谋杀，记忆和终极难的诸多后果。戈恩（Gorn）将埃米特·蒂尔（Emmett Till）的故事置于白人至上主义法律，政策和惯例的悠久历史的背景下，这使他的谋杀案得以成立和辩护，使他的行凶者无罪释放，并使他的故事沉默了。正是这样，戈恩最终要求读者看到，希望能够更全面地展现蒂尔的生活和记忆，这将有助于我们更好地理解我们悲惨的种族过去，可燃的现在以及为什么今天艾美特·蒂尔的故事比1955年以来的任何时候都广为人知。[结束页1]

该纽约客在2020年6月由卡迪尔·尼尔森（Kadir Nelson）绘制的封面照片中，发表了一个强有力的图像，将这两个谋杀案（甚至更多）相距半个多世纪。乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）的胸部上放着黑色图像，这些图像是从警察通过吉姆·克罗（Jim Crow）到今天被警察或其他国家认可的部队杀死或残酷殴打的。在纳尔逊（Nelson）的画中，微笑着的，天生的埃米特·蒂尔（Emmett Till）是乔治·弗洛伊德（George Floyd）的象征心。他的死亡代表了私刑和种族恐怖的历史与导致弗洛伊德（Floyd）死亡的暴力警务之间的联系；参与1920年代反私刑运动的NAACP活动家，1950年代和1960年代的民权斗争以及当前的黑人生活问题运动之间。纳尔逊的画作是对种族暴力和白人否认历史悠久的视觉表现，吊桥：种族暴力和美国的民权世纪，充实了这段历史。两位作者都要求我们更加认真和诚实地审视美国的种族主义历史，正如戈恩（Gorn）所说，这是“一个变形的恶魔，我们必须一次又一次地搏斗”（第6页）。

1955年夏天，芝加哥人埃米特·蒂尔（Emmett Till）前往密西西比州的Money探亲，结果被两名白人绑架并谋杀，原因是两名白人涉嫌“口哨”一名白人妇女。他的凶手罗伊·布莱恩特（Roy Bryant）和JW米拉姆（JW Milam）然后用棉杜松子酒绑在蒂尔（Till）的脖子上，将男孩的尸体推入塔拉哈奇河（Tallahatchie River），他们希望它能留在那里。蒂尔（Till）的失踪不过是私刑和种族恐怖的漫长而令人毛骨悚然的历史之一，在这一历史中没有人被追究责任。但是当一些年轻的渔夫看到saw肿的尸体漂浮在河上时，风扇...