“If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that’s so unjust,
“Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt, your mind is filled with dust.”
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your
blood it must refuse to flow,
“For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!”
– “The Death of Emmett Till” by Bob Dylan
We haven’t forgotten Emmett Till entirely. He still haunts our conscience when we are of a mind to remember that should never be forgotten.
But he is drifting away from us every day, which might not be the worst indignity he ever suffered, for at least he has peace wherever his soul is. Still, he is a wan ghost for us now, consumed by time and the forgetfulness that time imposes.
And reneging on her promise to find away to honor Till’s legacy and life was not the greatest crime Carolyn Towns committed in desecrating the remains in her care at Burr Oaks Cemetery in suburban Chicago. For those crimes, she has been sentenced to 12 years in prison.
She not only was guilty of greedy, criminal indifference, she gouged a hole in the heart of the region’s African-American community whose forebears were interred there.
But her crime against the child who became the nearly literal face of racial intolerance in America and roused us to shame was just as real. We could not turn away from his lynching murder on Aug. 25, 1955, in Mississippi because his mother showed us that face and what had been done to him.
And so, at long last, we came to our senses as a nation and began the path to civil rights and away from murderous intolerance. We remain on that path and likely will as long as the instinct to do right remains with us.
There had been plans to build a museum and memorial mausoleum in his honor at Burr Oaks. But the memorial, as with the memory of him, was whisked away in time.
Now his grave remains untouched in the middle of the Burr Oak cemetery, covered by a flat copper plate. His casket was sent to the Smithsonian.
But Emmett Till belongs to Illinois more than Mississippi where, oddly enough, his memory is more recognized in official remembrances.
If there is money to be raised for good causes and the will to remember, we must find a way to build that museum.
It need not be a sumptuous palace. Only a place of repose and dignity for a lost child who received neither in his death.
We owe it to him.
We owe it to ourselves.
Theeditor50's Blog 