July 2004
Remembering Emmett Till
50 years ago, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision shook the foundations of American segregation. In the 1950s, some southern states had laws on the books prohibiting “Reckless Eyeballing” of white women by black men. The legacy and unfinished business of that inhuman oppression still lives with us today, as evidenced by the Justice Department’s recent decision to re-open the case of the murder of Emmett Till. Till was a 14-year-old African American youth from Chicago whose mother had sent him to visit relatives in Mississippi in the summer of 1955. His brutal murder might have been just another unreported hate crime from the land of magnolias and mint juleps, were it not for the shocking image of Till’s pulverized face in an open casket. Then came repulsive accounts of his sadistic murder from the perpetrators themselves after their acquittal. Arguably, no single event so galvanized the nation’s conscience in those years as Emmett Till’s murder, as memorialized in Bob Dylan’s ballad and, more recently, in these powerful drawings by self-taught, Oakland outsider artist Per Frykdahl (aka Ward C. Picnic). Today, our political landscape has been awakened by similarly brutal images from Iraqi prisons. Frykdahl’s Emmett Till Story, recently exhibited at the Richmond Center for the Arts and published in its entirety as an underground comic book, reminds us how violence, racism, and fear lie just beneath the facade of contemporary society with its glib rhetoric of “compassionate conservatism” and “no child left behind.” Emmett Till was one child who was left behind, a child whose nightmare reminds us of our unfinished journey to a mountaintop some call the American Dream.
— Carl Nagin
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