The murder of Emmett Till was a moment that sparked a movement.

Sadly, we are never taught about this atrocity in our schools because the American education system has been whitewashed and things like this have been hidden to protect people from having to hear about injustice, racism and hatred towards the people.

Our guests today are educators who will discuss this brutal attack and murder of a child, and the movement that ensued from it.

Joining me today are Dr Robert Mayer, Professor Emeritus at Moravian University and the author of a book that comes out today called In the Name of Emmett Till - How the Children of the Mississippi Freedom Struggle Showed Us Tomorrow.

And Professor Roberta Meek of Muhlenberg College, she's an educator, a scholar and an activist.

Hi, I'm Phil Davis.

Welcome to Courageous Conversations.

Well, I'd like to thank the both of you for taking the time to join me for this very important conversation.

I want to begin with you, Dr Mayer.

Congratulations on your book that was just recently released.

What inspired you to write the book and to be involved in civil rights education?

- Well, it started at the time when I was a high school teacher, I taught for about 12 years and wanted to engage young people in history, finding sadly that they weren't always as engaged as I would have liked.

So when the time came for me to write, I reflected back on that time and thought, if I'm going to be trying to engage young people in history again, I want to try to find a subject where young people are involved.

And the first thing that came to mind was Birmingham.

And my first book was about Birmingham.

And then the more I read about Mississippi, I found the same was true.

But I think it's true of the civil rights movement in general, that there was a strong young backbone to the movement, but in Mississippi it was particularly powerful.

And those stories, discovering those stories, inspired me to really go more deeply into it.

- Well, that's exciting when you think about being able to educate children and then being a white male, but having this passion about civil rights and equity and justice and education is tremendously exciting.

So, so many people don't know about Emmett Till.

And of course, the title of the book is In The Name Of Emmett Till.

Tell us about Emmett Till and what happened with Emmett Till.

- Well, Emmett Till in 1955 was a 14-year-old boy living in Chicago with his mother.

He traveled to be with his cousins, his relatives in the Delta in Mississippi.

He went into a store and acted in a way that violated the code of conduct for African-Americans in Jim Crow, Mississippi.

- Jim Crow, yeah.

- And he was brutally murdered.

He was tortured and murdered, and his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

The men, two of the men who had murdered him, were tried and found innocent.

They were acquitted by an all-white jury.

So the story is an American tragedy.

- Yeah.

And there were many American tragedies similar to that.

Professor Meek, of course, the young lady who accused Emmett Till of doing wrong recently recanted.

Right?

And so this tragedy happened based off of a lie, which there are many other times in American history, right, where, specifically around white females and the accusation that, you know, a black man has disrespected and molested or even raped a white woman.

Can you talk a little bit about that, in times in our history when that has taken place?

- Sure.

Unfortunately, the history of lynching is not exclusively African-American and it's not exclusively around the issue of the protection of white womanhood, but it is predominantly that is the history.

And a number of things are important to consider here.

With Emmett Till, as you know, was talked about, that story really did launch a movement.

Mainly because Mamie Till Mobley refused to cover that and said, invited Jet magazine to take pictures.

And the September 15th, 1955 issue of Jet magazine, went out to, you know, many, many, many black households in the country.

- Nationwide.

- Yeah, my sister, who is six years older than me, was about five at the time and still can remember because she wasn't supposed to read it, but she saw it.

And those images are absolutely, you know, embedded in how she remembers things from that moment.

So, you know, the black press, which Jet magazine is part of... ..is a historical actor in the story, as is television, right?

So television didn't exist for many of the other lynchings and horrific things that happened.

But going further back, you're talking about after enslavement, the image of the kind of Sambo-esque black man - you know, lazy - doesn't make any sense, you're working the field so how are you lazy?

- For free.

Yeah.

- Yeah, for free.

But that kind of stupid image... ..converts to a brute, right?

- Hyper-sexualized.

- Hyper-sexualized, and that's because race evolves based on the needs of the power structure, and to make a black man bestial, scary.

And to use the rationale of the protection of white womanhood became the greatest impetus for lynchings.

There were lynchings during slavery, but the majority of them happened between 1865... ..the 1950s, I would say.

Now we could argue that some of those that have happened recently, we could even call legal lynchings.

Ask Martha Biondi, I can't take credit for that term.

But she wrote about it in her civil rights historical renderings.

But the lynching of black men is part of what prompted us to have an NAACP.

The NAACP was founded in 1909 after the 1908 Springfield race riot, which was, the impetus for that was again around a black man accused of... ..being inappropriate with a white woman, and it's not like that was the first race riot.

It's not like that was the only thing that happened.

But, you know, there's always catalyst, just like Emmett Till was for, you know, the youth movement that came out of that in the civil rights movement.

Yeah, and so the NAACP actually is, uh, you know, not the only thing, but the product of a lynching.

- Yeah, it's amazing when you think about some of the lynchings that we know about.

Rosewood.

Again, someone accused of, you know, having inappropriate behavior with a white female and that whole city gets decimated by the very affluent African-American community.

The Tulsa massacre in 1921, I believe it was - again, you know, a young man in an elevator gets accused and, you know, they're still now exhuming bodies and finding burial sites.

In 1921, 10,000 homes where were leveled, a very affluent African-American community was destroyed.

Over 300 people were killed.

You know, I read about what happened in Delaware in the early 1900s, where an African-American man was hanged and killed and mutilated because of an accusation against a white female.

And then we go back to Emmett Till and realize that was based on a lie.

I'm not saying that every last one was, but many times the individuals were not given due process.

You mentioned Fannie Lou Hamer in your book and the work that she did.

Can you expound on that a little bit?

- Sure.

Fannie Lou Hamer, she's one of the local people, one of...historian John Dittmer talks about the local people who were the organizers and the people in the movement.

And Fannie Lou Hamer exemplifies that.

She was a sharecropper and she lost her job because she went to register to vote.

She hadn't known that she could register to vote for most of her life and she discovered she could.

So she went and registered and lost her job.

Became an activist.

Worked with a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

- SCLC.

- In Mississippi And she experienced this horrible, horrible event returning from a conference where in Winona, Mississippi, she was part of a group they had sat in and wouldn't get on the back of the bus.

And they were held in prison and beaten, systematically beaten.

But it's like things rise.

And she had an opportunity at the 1964 Democratic National Convention to speak.

And she gave this amazing talk where she told the nation.

And I think some of the things she said were news to white ears.

She talked about her experience being beaten returning from the conference because of that.

And it's like Mrs Mamie Till Mobley, who she, you know, was one of us, a normal, everyday person.

And her bravery of speaking out for her son really launched the movement.

And same with Mrs Hamer.

She did the same thing.

- It's amazing when you consider the kind of intestinal fortitude and strength and wisdom that it took for Emmett Till's mother to say, no, we're not going to close the casket.

I want the world to see.

And this is in a time when African-Americans were marginalized.

But she had the strength to really tap into something that said the world really needs to see this injustice.

And who knows?

If they close the casket, maybe we're not talking about Emmett Till right now, and many others who have suffered such atrocities, you know, while here in America.

Can you talk a little bit, Professor Meek, you work with students, and when you begin to share information like this, how does it impact them?

And what has been your experience with kind of the revelation of the injustices that are happening in our country?

- Well, I would say working with students, even before I was teaching at the college level, I did a lot of work, volunteer work with students from kindergarten through eighth grade, let's say, doing some workshops that I used to do called There's A Message In The Song.

And...

Particularly teaching folks who are not from the South, right, who are young, are shocked about many of these things.

But when I got to the college teaching, one of the things that I absolutely do is I tell them why I'm a historian.

I'm a historian because you cannot understand the present without understanding the past.

Things don't come out of nowhere.

So, you know, 1955, when things are beginning to mobilize into a national civil rights movement, didn't happen out of nowhere.

- Right.

- There are decades, if not centuries, before that, that feed that.

And I also tell them, I'm not here to tell you something in a sterile fashion.

One, I grew up in an activist family.

So I come to this with an investment, and there is no such thing as objectivity.

So the fact that I am being very clear about where I come from, you just have a lot of folks who don't come clean about where they're coming from.

But I also tell them I'm not going to ask you to not have emotional reactions to what I'm asking you to take in.

Images of lynching.

Images of Mamie Till's memoir is one of the pieces I've had them read several chapters out of.

And there are pages in which she describes what it was like for... You can feel the intensity of what it was like to look at her son in the state that he barely looked like a human being.

- And he was a teenager.

- He was 14.

He was a boy.

He was not a man.

And that is one of the things that happens with black children, period, male and female is, you know, they're not allowed the luxury of childhood.

But she describes from his toes to his head in her memoir what it was like to identify his body.

And I asked them to take that in.

And actually, I used to read it to them so that they could hear it, because when they read it the night before, they might have been horrified by the things.

But when you hear it.

And, you know, most of the room would be crying.

I would be crying.

And I tell them, you know, history is not asking you to be some distant sanitized, whatever.

This is raw.

This is real.

- And when you think about that level of vitriol, that level of hate, that level that you can take a 14-year-old child.

There has to be a dehumanization that takes place in the mind and in the consciousness to beat someone to that level.

And then, of course, all of the other atrocities that took place, you know, there was a movement, right, that was birthed out of this atrocity.

And many of our movements, to your point, Professor Meek, came out of, you know, just horrific things that happened to our community.

Can you talk a little bit about the movement and what happened in Mississippi, and why Mississippi is so special in your in your view?

- Sure.

It's unbelievable in the context of a world that allows the murder of a 14-year-old boy and the murder systematically is washed away, that young people experience that, some as young as ten or 11 experience that.

And the takeaway they took from it was, first of all, just the awful emotionality of it.

But then the fact we've got to do something.

That's actually a direct quote from one of the people I write about, Brenda Travis.

She says, we've got to do something.

She said this when she was 10, one day.

Well, and she's just one example I could speak of, Brenda Travis.

She's ten when Emmett Till was murdered, she is profoundly moved.

And then, at 16, she becomes involved in the movement, working primarily with SNCC, with the great Bob Moses, who just recently passed away.

And she's working with him, going door to door, trying to get people to register to vote.

She goes on, she wants to do direct action and she goes down to the Greyhound station with two other teenagers.

They go into the white section to purchase a ticket and they're arrested.

Brenda Travis, at 16, spends 28 days in jail, gets out.

She goes back to her high school and she is expelled.

Her principal says that the white superintendent has ordered me to expel you for your civil rights activities.

So she sits in assembly that day and the word starts to get around.

And her fellow students, many of them are outraged.

And 114 of them walk out that day behind Brenda Travis in support of her.

So that's a reflection of how something moved from Emmett Till and just touched a lot of people and got the movement going.

And that's just one story.

This was in McComb, Mississippi.

It's just one place, one story, one person.

And there's many, many stories like that.

- Thousands over decades, right?

That have really shaped, ended up shaping the movement and moving it forward.

And the type of courage that it must have taken for them to rebel in a moment like that in Jim Crow's South, in Mississippi, you know, and to think about that kind of student movement.

It seems that there is a movement happening now.

You know, went after the murder of George Floyd in May of last year, I was moved by this this new generation and this mobilization of students.

And you both work with students.

But Professor Meek, can you tell me what you have seen and what has moved these students and how they're kind of mobilizing and making their voices heard?

- Well, I would say students, young people, nothing's happened in terms of transformation in society, at least our society, without young people.

And so, again, sorry, got to give a little historical context.

- It's OK, you're a historian, we expect that from you.

- Speaking of SNCC, you know, one of the things that's so important, that's the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which was founded in 1960 after this, like just a couple of months after the sit-in, February 1st, 1960 in Greensboro, North Carolina.

And the great Ella Baker, who you mention in your book, calls everybody together at Shaw University in North Carolina and says, let's get everybody together who is working on this.

And those young people, who are mostly college-age students, literally SNCC transforms the civil rights movement.

- Wow.

- So without that, we would not have had things move as quickly as they did.

But today, students are mobilizing again.

They have been periodically over the years on college campuses.

The question is whether it will be sustained.

But what happened after George Floyd was, and it was - a global phenomenon.

- It really was.

- And we've never seen that, even with the civil rights movement.

We've never seen the numbers of people who hit the streets, the sustained action that happened over that entire summer - again, globally.

And where it was not predominantly black people out on the streets.

- So true.

- So our young people on our college campuses are joining a movement that, again, is kind of a first.

- And it's wonderful to see, it really is.

Even platforms like this, for me to have this conversation with you all, and multiple conversations.

We've done everything from Jim Crow to reparations, to highlighting students of color in the Lehigh Valley.

And prior to the George Floyd incident, the George Floyd murder - I call it a public lynching - you know, these platforms were not available.

So many a times out of atrocity comes opportunity to really bring sustainable change.

Your book really speaks to some very real movement and very real people.

What I got from the time that I had to review is that this is not something that is disconnected from real humanity.

How did it impact you as an author, doing the research and understanding the individuals that you were interacting with while you were doing your work?

- It...

It's moving to read about people who are living in the context of an environment like Jim Crow, Mississippi, to rise up, to speak out the way they did.

I guess the other thing that's slowly crept up and crept into my consciousness as I'm reading, is I begin to get a sense of the African-American community in Mississippi, both from my visits and from video I've observed and the sense of how that community, that came together as part of it, it was a cross-generational thing.

And so I was moved by the African-American community in Mississippi, learning about them.

That was... That touched me very much.

But in the same sense, my head starts to leap and I think of Emmett Till, but then I think of Trayvon Martin and... We did, the Black Lives Matter movement did grow out of Trayvon Martin's murder, lynching, but it wasn't as fervent as what happened with George Floyd.

And perhaps that's Darnella Frazier who took that video and gave that image.

There wasn't the same kind of image.

So I'm moved in the sense that looking for those connections from what happened in Mississippi to today.

- Yeah, thank you.

I mean, it is so true.

We as African-Americans have been saying this for years.

The cameras now provide proof.

We go back to Rodney King and still we are found guilty of some level of violence even when we're being beat with sticks on camera.

And yet we still have to fight to get justice.

And it's very...

It can be very challenging.

I told someone the other day, it's exhausting to wake up and see the news, hear the news, read the news.

Another black man, another black man, another black child shot and killed.

Professor, you have first-hand knowledge, but you are also a child of the movement.

How has that shaped you and how has that, you know, given you a framework to operate from?

- It has shaped every fiber of who I am.

You know, I grew up in Philadelphia, and I do want to mention that, as much as we are talking about this as history, as we are talking about the Jim Crow South, realize that this was not only a Southern phenomenon.

In Philadelphia in 1967, when I was 11 years old, there was a group of thousands of black high school students who left their classrooms in an organized fashion - they had planned this - to go down to the Board of Education, and their demands were fairly simple, which was we want to be able to wear afros, we want to be able to wear dashikis, and we want black history, and we want - some black teachers.

- Yeah.

My mom was one of the people inside the Board of Education trying to negotiate on their behalf.

And Frank L. Rizzo, who was at that time the, I don't even know if he was captain of police, but he was a policeman.

- They dropped a bomb on... - Yes, that was moved.

- Yes.

The whole community.

- Yeah.

- There's been a long history.

- Yeah.

But the point is that this was happening, there were things happening, New York City had a big student walk-out.

So and that's because things were problematic in the north as well.

So that has completely shaped me.

And I had the honor of, for example, meeting Fannie Lou Hamer when I was ten.

- Yeah.

- You know, I was one of the people, weird freak, who just was, you know, however old, eight, and watching the 1964 convention.

We were actually in Atlantic City because my dad was there just to see what was going on.

He wasn't involved in it.

But, you know, we were watching, we pulled in the TV in the hotel room and watched Fannie Lou Hamer's speech.

And, you know, so it's shaped me.

- So you've had a lot of experience.

And thank God that you now are taking that experience and transferring it to those students that you've been working with for many years now.

Dr. Mayer, we're coming to a close, but you're going to be doing a talk about your book at the Lehigh Valley Justice Institute fundraiser soon.

- That's right.

- And people can actually acquire your book on Amazon and different platforms.

And again, the title is going to be on the screen and we've already shown it, but we just want to make sure that this very important word gets out.

Just in a minute, can you tell me, what do you hope people will take away from your book?

I want people to be inspired by these young people, and in particular, I want young people to be inspired.

I want young black students to be able to see themselves represented in history and in an essential way, something essential to American democracy.

So that's...

I want people to be inspired by those young activists.

- Thank you so much.

Thank you.

And thank you to the both of you for taking the time out to join us.

Professor and Dr. Mayer, Professor Meek, thank you so much for taking time.

It's a very important conversation, a Courageous Conversation to discuss things of this issue.

And on behalf of everyone here at PBS39, I'm Pastor Phillip Davis.

Thank you for tuning in.

God bless you, and keep being courageous.