Between Seeing and Believing, Memory and Forgetting, Innocence and Guilt
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Between Seeing and Believing, Memory and Forgetting, Innocence and Guilt
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...
