Hello Alamo!
Next week is my birthday, and I intend to enjoy it without worry so I won’t be posting. However, I do want to write about the subject of one of my Media History projects in college.
As much as I would love to solely highlight the amazing accomplishments of the Black community on this blog for February, oftentimes that’s not the full picture. In this case, what happened is gruesome and tragic, but what the family chose to do despite their unimaginable grief made a big difference.
In 1955, a young boy by the name of Emmett Till was visiting family in Mississippi when he supposedly interacted with a white woman named Carolyn Bryant. Because of this interaction, the Till child was lynched in the night by her brother and husband, partially by drowning.
Putting myself in that situation, I can’t imagine how long it took to find him, find out what happened, be taken seriously about a missing family member, etc., all with racism tainting the whole thing.
The whole point of the project was to be able to identify and find primary and secondary sources. The primary source I found only exists because of Black journalism and the family’s choice to have photographers present for Till’s open-casket funeral.
I have heard that the images of Till’s bloated and mutilated body, which his mother wanted “all to see,” is the catalyst that really kicked off the Civil Rights Movement.
As much as I think she is an absolute badass for making that choice at the time, nowadays I would say that directly witnessing oppression can be really good as long as the witnesses are taking it to heart and using it as motivation to make the world a more just place. Unfortunately, there are a lot of powerful people who refuse to see or learn anything, so the grief just piles up for those of us who already do.
Gaza, Black Lives Matter, MMIW, Elijah Hadley and probably countless more that simply came too soon for us to care about here in Alamogordo…. ultimately I think it’s good to grieve for all of humanity. It’s honest. We just need to know how to take small breaks to find joy when we need it. Then be brave like Mamie Bradley.
Salud.
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