We discussed the photograph of the murdered Emmett Till in class, and what that image meant to the world. What Emmett Till’s mother might not have realized when she insisted on an open casket, and the subsequent photographs, is just how powerful that image would become…Just this evening (Friday August 28th) I was watching the Channel 5 News and a report on Emmett Till surfaced.
To delve into a short tangent…apparently, based on another report, by the Associated Press, just last month Emmet Till’s casket was discovered in a storage shed at a cemetary near Chicago. The casket allegedly had been pulled from the ground when his body was exumed back in 2005 (for autopsy and later a reburial in another casket).
Now that is has been recovered, the original casket is now going to the Smithsonian Institution where it will be featured in an exhibit in the planned National Museum of African American History and Culture.
This relates back to what we also discussed in class concerning signifiers and the signified.
When Till’s mother insisted on an open casket for her murdered 14 year old son, she knew the power that image would have even fifty years later. People would remember what happened to Emmett Till.
I wonder if Mrs. Till knew that one day Emmett's picture would not only remind people of what happened to him, but that his casket would become a signifier for, in the words of the Associated Press, “the civil rights movement that helps tell the story of what is both one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history and a moment that helped change it.”
Perhaps the people responsible for Emmett's death, and those who shared their sentiments, didn't give the images a second thought. I don't know about anyone else, but this leads me to contemplate which images of our time, ones we might not give much more than a passing glance, may one day impact the world in some great way.
It's interesting how standard (at the time)and quickly forgotten hate crime was immortalized in the history books due to Emmet's mother making the brave choice to hold an open casket funeral.
ReplyDeleteHonestly I never heard of Emmett Till before encountering it the text book. The photo looks like the sort of thing you would expect to see from War photos, which speaks volumes about the brutality of his killers.
I did a bit of digging out of curiosity and found that PBS actually did a film on Emmet Till's story: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/