America is still killing Emmett Till, but often by means less direct than bludgeons and bullets. The most successful killers of African American youth are poverty, resegregated and neglected public schools, gang violence, and lack of economic opportunities. Violence and exploitation against black women scar whole communities, and mothers still bear the burden of burying black sons. In many inner cities the drug trade is the only enterprise that is hiring, while the national unemployment rate for young black men is well over twice that for other young men. The so-called war on drugs successfully targets young African American men, even though blacks and whites use and sell illicit drugs at roughly the same rate. The enormous incarcerated and judicially supervised population of the United States has become disproportionately a population of color. Writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, “A society that protects some people through a system of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.”20
African American males experience the highest imprisonment rate of all demographic groups. In Washington, D.C., the country’s capital, roughly 75 percent of young black men can anticipate serving time in prison, and the percentage is still higher in the city’s poorest neighborhoods. The criminal justice system in some states imprisons black men on drug charges at rates twenty to fifty times higher than those of white men. In major cities where the drug war rages, as many as 80 percent of young black men have criminal records and thus can be legally discriminated against in housing, employment, and often voting for the rest of their lives. These statistics reflect the emergence of a new racial caste system, born from the one that killed Emmett Till.21 “While the blame for the grisly mutilation of Till has been placed upon two cruel men,” Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1958, “the ultimate responsibility for [the Till lynching] and other tragic events must rest with the American people themselves.”22
We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy. As a political program white supremacy avers that white people have a right to rule. That is obviously morally unacceptable, and few of its devotees will speak its name. But that enfeebled faith is not nearly so insidious and lethal as its robust, covert, and often unconscious cousin: the assumption that God has created humanity in a hierarchy of moral, cultural, and intellectual worth, with lighter-skinned people at the top and darker-skinned people at the bottom. Unfortunately this poisonous notion is as dangerous in the minds of people of color as it is in the minds of whites. “The glorification of one race and the consequent debasement of another—or others—always has been and always will be a recipe for murder,” writes James Baldwin.23 It also remains a recipe for toxic self-hatred.
The ancient lie remains lethal. It shoots first and dodges questions later. White supremacy leaves almost half of all African American children growing up in poverty in a de-industrialized urban wasteland. It abandons the moral and practical truth embodied in Brown v. Board of Education and accepts school resegregation even though it is poisonous to the poor. Internalized white supremacy in the minds of black youth guns down other black youth, who learn from media images of themselves that their lives are worth little enough to pour out in battles over street corners. White supremacy also trembles the hands of some law enforcement officers and vigilantes who seem unable to distinguish between genuine danger and centuries-old phantoms.
To see beyond the ghosts, all of us must develop the moral vision and political will to crush white supremacy—both the political program and the concealed assumptions. We have to come to grips with our own history—not only genocide, slavery, exploitation, and systems of oppression, but also the legacies of those who resisted and fought back and still fight back. We must find what Dr. King called the “strength to love.” New social movements must confront head-on the racial chasm in American life. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin instructs, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”24
Our strivings will unfold in a fallen world, among imperfect people who have inherited a deeply tragic history. There will be no guarantee of success. But we have guiding spirits who still walk among us. We have the courtroom of historical memory, where Reverend Moses Wright still stands and says, “There he is.” We have the boundless moral landscape where Mamie Bradley still shakes the earth with her candor and courage. We have the bold voices of the Black Lives Matter movement, demanding justice now and reminding us to remember Emmett Till, to say his name. We have the enduring NAACP and the interracial “Moral Mondays” coalition spreading out of North Carolina, like the sit-ins once did, and dozens of other similar crusades across the country.25 We can still hear the marching feet of millions in the streets of America, all of them belonging to the children of Emmett Till.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
In the dark mines of this story, I was grateful that I never worked alone. My first debts are to David Cecelski, William H. Chafe, Steve Kantrowitz, and Craig Werner, unwavering friends and brilliant editors who lived with this book for years. Likewise, historians John Dittmer, Danielle McGuire, Lane Windham, Curtis Austin, Christopher Metress, David Beito, and Jane Dailey all offered vital comments. The brilliant Evan Lewis gave me priceless help and friendship, as did her parents, Ken Lewis and Holly Ewell-Lewis.
Other scholars and writers—Dan Carter, Will Jones, Kevin Kruse, Charles McKinney, Jerry Mitchell, Adriane Lentz-Smith, and Jason Morgan Ward—all offered crucial aid.
My research assistant, Melody Ivins, helped dredge up and digest much of this story and offered years of constant encouragement. She and Wilmarie Cintron-Muniz, Michael Grathwohl, Sam Tyson, and Vernon Tyson helped ransack the Mississippi archives, as did Simon Balto and Amanda Klonsky in the Chicago Public Library.
I am thankful to my colleagues at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Wesley Hogan sat with me by the cornfield and shared her brilliant insights. Tom Rankin taught me how to cook a pig and escorted me to the ruins of Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market. Mike Wiley’s Dar He, a dramatic rendition of the Emmett Till story, fired my imagination, particularly when I watched him perform it at a refurbished tractor dealership not far from where Emmett Till died. Mary D. Williams inspired, comforted, and carried me in our public work and personal friendship. Jennifer Dixon-McKnight, Theo Luebke, Will Griffin, and Sarah Rogers kept our classes on track so that I could remain preoccupied with Emmett Till.
Other friends also kept me in my right mind. I am grateful to Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, II; Herman Bennett; Nick Biddle; Sam Bridges; Vera Cecelski; Lorna Chafe; Katherine Charron; Louise and Steve Coggins; Jim Conway; Mary Ellen Curtin; Suzanne Desan; Kirsten Fischer; Barbara Forrest; Christina Greene; Laura Hanson; Pernille Ipsen; Rhonda Lee; Eddie McCoy; Lettie McCoy; Al McSurely; Jennifer Morgan; Leslee Nelson; Drew Ross; Rob Stephens; Doug Tanner; and Gayle Weitz.