Pitts: Nation shaped by Emmett Till’s death, always will be

The body that was pulled from the Tallahatchie River three days afterward barely resembled a human being, much less a prankish boy. It was bloated to the point of shapelessness and had been savagely beaten. An eye had been gouged out. There was a bullet hole in the skull.

The brothers freely admitted kidnapping the boy. A witness placed Milam at a barn inside of which he said he heard a child being tortured. Yet jurors acquitted them in less than an hour. One said it took that long only because they stopped to “drink pop.”

Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on an open casket funeral. She said she wanted the world to see what had happened to her child in America. The world saw and was horrified. African-Americans saw and seethed with a familiar outrage that was old even then.

Four months later, an Alabama seamstress named Rosa Parks refused a bus driver’s demand for her seat. There are those who say the two events were not unrelated.

And here, perhaps the reader looks to the writer for assurance that while you can vandalize a sign you cannot, in fact, murder memory. The writer has no such assurance to give.

You can’t murder a memory

Whoever destroyed that sign represents, albeit crudely, an emerging American consensus. It says that things which give us pain are better off forgotten, some memories better off dead.

So you get Cal Thomas and Snoop Dogg complaining that “Roots” has been remade. And textbooks teaching slavery as “immigration.” And Margaret Biser, a docent on a Southern plantation, writing of being scolded once that talking about slave life “is bringing down America.”

Forget about it, they say. Forget Rubin Stacy and Mary Turner. Forget Trayvon Martin. Forget Emmett Till.

We’d never say, Forget Anne Frank. That would be like killing her all over again. But then, America bears no conscience scars there. America did not kill her. In its intransigence and hatred it did, however, kill Emmett.

Nor is this the first time the marker of that tragedy has been damaged. In Mississippi such markers are often vandalized.

With spray paint and guns or just refusal and denial, some of us seek to murder memory. But others of us stand stubbornly in memory’s defense. One is glad to hear money is being raised to replace the sign.

Besides, even if you kill memory, you do not escape the past. America is shaped by Emmett Till’s death and always will be, even if we no longer know his name.

We make history. But history makes us, too.