After the Uvalde shooting, people are considering if an ‘Emmett Till moment’ might change the gun debate.
In the wake of the Uvalde massacre, Emmett Till’s name is again at the forefront of a national conversation, this time about gun control. Till was the 14-year-old boy lynched by a group of white men in 1955 in Mississippi. Images of his mutilated body shocked the country and galvanized civil rights activists.
As people inside and outside newsrooms struggle with whether showing brutal images of slain children might move people and politicians toward collective action, Emmett’s family talks about power and pain, and the impact and limitations of an image.
Today, in honor of Juneteenth, we kick off a week of episodes about the Black experience with the question: Is this country in the middle of another “Emmett Till” moment?
Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times reporter Marissa Evans
More reading:
After Uvalde shooting, people consider an ‘Emmett Till moment’ to change gun debate
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Ollie: Anything that happens, trust me, Emmett’s name comes up.
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Gustavo: Ollie Gordon is a cousin of Emmett till. Till, of course, was the 14 year old boy lynched by a group of white men in 1955 in Mississippi.
Ollie: We get alerts on the phone, anytime his name is used and you get those Google alerts all the time you know, some of it makes sense. And some of it doesn’t.
Gustavo: Images of Till's mutilated body shocked the country and galvanized civil rights activists…like few things before… or since
Ollie: I'm just not sure that an Emmett Till moment is going to have the effect that people think it's going to have.
Gustavo: In the wake of the Uvalde massacre. Emmett Till's name is again at the forefront of a national conversation, this time about gun control.
Now, as people inside and outside of newsrooms struggle with whether showing brutal images of 19 slain children might move people and politicians toward collective action; Emmett's family speaks.
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Gustavo: I'm Gustavo Ariano. You're listening to The Times, daily news from the LA times. It's Monday, June 20th, 2022. This week, in honor of Juneteenth. We're running episodes about the black experience. Today is this country in the middle of another Emmett Till moment?
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Gustavo: Marissa Evans covers healthcare and communities of color in California. Marissa, welcome to The Times.
Marissa: Thank you.
Gustavo: After the Uvalde massacre, you sought out the family of Emmett till. Why?
Marissa: You know, after. I read all the coverage so far at the time of the Uvalde shooting. And I was reading about all the children who died and the teachers who died and the parents reacting and the police response, I noticed on Twitter and just across social media platforms, people were talking about the need for the paradigm shift for how we think about gun violence, how we think about how children are impacted by gun violence. And I noticed people kept saying, we need an Emmett Till moment.
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AP clip: His body was pulled up from a Tallahassee river, it was badly mutilated and bloated. This became a large event in the civil rights movement because his mother chose to have an open casket funeral in Chicago.
AP clip: You know? She turned her brokenheartedness into, uh, a weapon for justice and made her private agony a public cause.
AP clip: We come, not just to remember Emmett, but we come to commit ourselves in his name to fight all the conditions that murdered him, the conditions that still murder our children today, across this country.
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Marissa: This idea of showing the public, showing the world the damage that guns can do to a small child's body.
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Gustavo: There were Black people lynched before Emmett, there were Black people lynched after him. What is it, though, about his story that continues to resonate over 60 years later after it happened.
Marissa: The big thing at the time is, you know, in 1955, when Emmett was killed, television was just starting to come. There was no social media, there was no internet. If you really wanted to get the news, you had to find your paper, find your magazine. And particularly for Black folks, you really had to go to the Black press to get your news. You could not rely on white led media organizations to actually cover this at a time because they too were in bed with white supremacists and white supremacy. // And condoned a lot of racist violence, which we saw at that time. So you really had only so many outlets as a black person to get your news really have an understanding what was going on other states with black people. But Mamie till Mobley. Emmett Till's mother said at the time, after she figured out what happened to her son after she saw what happened to her son, the way his face was brutalized and swollen and beaten, she famously said, let the world see.
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Marissa: And she invited jet magazine, a Black magazine, to photograph Emmett actually at the funeral, open casket, showing people what he actually looked like when he died.
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Marissa: And those photos really haunted people. That was one of the first times people really saw in real time in published format, what racist violence looked like, what hatred can really look like.
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AP clip: I lost my innocence, I saw violence that, and I saw hatred that I had never experienced before. And for years, I walked around with a chip on my shoulder. I did all I could to try to get even.
Marissa: I think so often people mentioned Emmett's name because it resonated with them.
AP clip: It’s been told mostly as a Southern horror movie as a, kind of as a redneck Frankenstein.
Marissa: I would argue that it’s one of the few historical instances of people can point to as a collective unit and say this happened, and it has stuck with us for over 60 years.
AP clip: And of course it's a, a horrible and brutal tragedy,
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Marissa: But, uh, I think what is most important is what do we do with that?
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Gustavo: You could see graphically what had been done to Emmett. Then you heard the story of why this had been done to him and why Emmett was lynched. And then that photo stuck with you after the man who did this to him, were acquitted of anything to have done with the lynching.
Marissa: Exactly. Exactly. And that's also was another reason why there was such an outrage over what happened, not just because of the sheer violence but the violence committed against child because people are so quick to make black boys older than what they are or older than what they actually are. So, and it was 14, that's still a child. And so the idea that this could happen to a child really bothered people, it obviously created like a wave of grief and a wave of trauma for his own family to bear witness to that. And I think in a lot of ways, that's one of the moments that people consistently go back to as an idea of not only looking at violence, but like what we need to do as a society to potentially have this major cultural paradigm shift. And that photo was one of the reasons why the civil rights movement was fueled. People became so outraged that people in other states learned about what happened to him and realized something more collective had to be done.
Gustavo: Do you think then it was inevitable that people would make the connection between Emmett Till and Uvalde?
Marissa: In some ways, yes. I think anytime it comes to thinking about children, images of children that stick with you, people think of Emmett. They think of what happened to him. And again, the shocking violence of the Uvalde shooting, and a lot of mass shootings, particularly Sandy Hook even, has bothered people in the last near decade, since at least Sandy hook happened, Columbine bothered people because those were also kids who died. Even if they were teenagers, they were still kids. They were somebody's kid. So I think that people making that parallel was an interesting one because this is one of the few times where people actually want to use history as a way to drive policy, to drive change. But again, there's all of these other factors. I think that people don't often consider when saying. Well, these parents should just show the photos of their loved ones and how they looked when they were shot. I think people often underestimate the implications of doing that. And that's why I set out to really talk to Emmett Till's family. I think so often, people will mention Emmett Till's name, and I saw some outlets actually mention his name, maybe a little paragraph about Emmett. But I just kept reading the stories and thinking, well, has anyone actually reached out to consider how his family feels about him being brought up now, as it relates to the gun control debate? I think that's important that they actually have a say or have at least an opinion on what that means for them as a family, because every time his name is brought up, that's a trauma for them. That image still haunts them.
Gustavo: And what did his family say about that comparison?
Marissa: One of the people I spoke to for my reporting, I talked to Ollie Gordon, who is one of Emmett's cousins.
Marissa Tape: I wanted to reach out see what your thoughts are on the idea of if another Amatil moment is needed.
Ollie: Oh, that's a loaded question. I have seen that a lot as I scroll through the Facebook; they kept saying “an Emmett till moment, an Emmett Till moment.”
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Marissa: She was seven years old at the time when Emmet died, but she was living in the same house as him in Chicago. Then he went off to Mississippi to go visit family, and then he never came back.
Ollie: The people that killed Emmit, they set out to do just that because he was black and because he went against the wounds that they had in Mississippi at the time, the Jim Crow rules. And they meant to do that, to send a message to the Black people, to keep them in their place out of fear or what have you.
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Marissa: And so she was so fascinating to talk to because she does media interviews, a decent amount, obviously, especially over recent years, but, she said this was a hard question for her to consider and answer because…
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Marissa: She sees it herself every single time.
Ollie: Because you do see it, you know, you see it on the news. Now maybe if they show it in the magnitude of all of the… even the bodies or what have you It's very difficult for me to say or do a comparison. I think they're all, I think hate crimes. Emmett was lynched. He was hung from a tree. Maybe just the tactics was used, was different.
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Marissa: Some of these incidences, whether it's mass shooting, whether it's of Rihanna Taylor incident,
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Ollie: I'm going, you know, okay, here we go. Again, everything is gone right back to Emmett Till modern day Emmett Till, they all do a comparison, George Floyd trayvon Martin, same thing. And in a sense, they are comparable, but in another sense, they are different.
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Marissa: Any time violence is happening, particularly against Black people, or just in general in our culture, Emmett's name comes up and she sees it because she gets the Google alerts. Whenever his name comes up.
Gustavo: How does the family of Emmett Till feel every time there's a massacre and there's the inevitable phone call or the inevitable email for a comment connecting what happened to Emmett, his lynching, to whatever massacre happened today?
Marissa: For them it's become expected in a lot of ways. I mean, they don't do media all of the time, but they also understand that especially the family members who are consistently in the media, consistently actively taking steps to keep Emmett's name alive and keep Mamie Till Mobley’s legacy alive too. They realized this comes with the territory
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Gustavo: We'll have more after this break.
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Gustavo: Marissa, are families of Uvalde victims planning to have open caskets?
Marissa: So in the last couple of weeks, there have already been some funerals. I believe the last one is happening sometime this month. And I think some families have had open caskets, but they haven't had the media actually photographing or taking video of their children in the casket. And I don't believe any family has really // looked to really get those images published.
Gustavo: So who's pushing this idea that if families share those graphic images of Uvalde victims, that that might push people to confront the horrors of gun massacres?
Marissa: What I've seen online. It's been a combination of people. It's people who are truly fed up with gun violence and mass shootings happening in our society and think that this might be the best way forward. It’s also people in the media who have said media outlets need to take more action, more stringent action, like publishing those photos or those videos to really show our audiences what this violence actually looks like, particularly against children. One of the people I spoke to in my story is David Boardman. He is the Dean of Temple university's college of journalism But he is also the former editor of the Seattle Times. And when he was one of the first media people after the Uvalde shooting to say, I never thought in all my years as a journalist, I'd say this, but maybe this is the time we need to actually start publishing these photos. So he's said, if he were in a newsroom today, leading a newsroom today, he would try to wait to ask families to make the decision about publishing images, but he'd also said he wanted to do as respectfully as possible. And he'd also make sure that they were aware of the potential backlash of doing something like that and how these photos can be misused for misinformation or disinformation purposes. He said I think so often I took a more conservative approach when I was an editor, well publishing images, because I wanted to think about harm. I wanted to think about potential trauma that families and victims might be facing if such photos were published. But what I've found now is what we're doing is not working. These politicians are not changing their mind on gun violence and gun policies that have been introduced in Congress, even at the state level, state legislature level. But then you also have some politicians who are also saying that we need some type of bigger, again, paradigm shift to really move forward the conversation on gun policy.
Gustavo: What did Ollie Gordon, the cousin of Emmett Till think about that idea.
Marissa: She said for her, she is not sure if it would work.
Ollie: I don't think that opening the casket today, in this time, would have had the same effect that it had, uh, 67 years.
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Marissa: Not because it's not sad or shocking, but because people are so used to seeing those images in those videos these days, necessarily because they're going on YouTube or going somewhere on the internet because it's on your television.
Ollie: It's almost like, okay, let me turn the TV on today and see who shot who.
Marissa: The television news will show you, cycle after cycle, of the same videos. You have newspaper outlets like ourselves that will post some of these videos.
Ollie: Even with George Floyd they kept showing it on TV. I was unable. I had to close my eyes and just turn the channel and my heart went out for his family. That had to be subjected to that every single day on the hour on the hour, it was a bit much.
Marissa: It's inescapable in a lot of ways, she said. And so for her, she's not sure if that is going to be the way. As sad as it is, she's not sure if it will still resonate with people, particularly since, as she put it, you know, it's a big deal for people to feel like their guns are being taken away from them. Even if there are children involved in all of this.
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Ollie: I think some people are just reaching for answers for understanding. Some people, think that an Emmett Till moment is going to bring about a change in the minds of the people that have the power to make, you know, to change the gun laws. And I don't think that it's going to, I mean, it hasn't done it in all these years. //
Gustavo: I Imagine though there's also a risk in repeatedly running images or footage or audio of these graphic dramatic instances on a loop because you don't know who's going to be seeing it. And you also don't know the trauma that it's going to be causing to people who see it.
Marissa: Exactly. I think that's something that Ali talked a lot about when we were on our interview too. Even after my story ran, I spoke to her and she said, , these are images that she and her family are still living. Over 60 years later. So imagine all the different outlets and now that they can actually access those photos that not just her family, but other people can access those photos. That's a big deal. Over 60 years later, that this terrible tragedy happened to a family member and their photo is just out there on the internet.
Ollie: Television was to us as to what the internet is to social media. And up until that point, the world could not see you or did not know what was going on. It might've been in a magazine or a newspaper, but it was local. It hasn't gone international. It's different now. I mean, every time you turn on the TV, it's not Uvalde. It's so many different places. And so many times it's like I think maybe you do become in order to survive. Maybe you do come a little bit desensitized.
Marissa: And I think the big thing in a lot of this I have found is, so often I think people are quick to say, well, just put the photos out there. But I think there's also that step back period folks want to take where they have to remind themselves that their family members did not ask to be the face of gun violence or mass shootings. It was a happenstance thing for them. // And so I think for her, she said that it often comes down to figuring out why do people need to see those images? And even now she said, you know, over all this time, she is in her seventies and she is still haunted by those images. She doesn't even need to look them up. She says that because that image of Emmett in his casket still haunts here in a lot of ways
Ollie: It was very, um, disturbing, very grotesque. So it did have a devastating effect on me. Even now, when I see things and hear things, it still brings tears to my eyes. Because many times when I do a reporter talk like this, the tears just come, I don't know where they come from. It’s not something that I have control over.
Marissa: And so even when you're thinking about the Sandy Hook families, when they first caught wind that people were hoping that they would release photos of their children, those families rallied with the Connecticut legislature, We don't want that.
Marissa: Look at what happened to the Sandy Hook families.
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AP clip: A Connecticut judge has found “Info Wars” host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, liable for damages in lawsuits, brought by parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting. The parents of several children, sued Jones over his claims that the massacre was a hoax.
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Marissa: So there's a lot of potential risk there, and I think it's very important that we look to history, but there's also something to be said about understanding that history is only a guide. It can't necessarily be the end, all be all for how we make change and affect change.
Gustavo: And it's also very easy for people who are not affected to say, oh, the families should step up. They're victims of this, either a lynching of racialized terror or gun massacres, you should step up and be an advocate so more these deaths don't happen again, where sometimes the family just wants to mourn and they want to mourn in privacy.
Marissa: Well, and that's what I found when I was talking to Jesse Salisbury from the Emmett till interpretive center. When I interviewed him, he said, as admirable. For example, as Mamie Till Mobley was to have the courage and the gumption to show what happened to her son. That was still a very difficult decision for her. She made that decision, but she didn't make it lightly. And she also knew that in a bigger way, as Ollie told me when we were on the phone the other day, she said, Ms. Mobley really wanted her son's death to live on in infinity so people would understand the ramifications of racial violence to understand like what hatred could look like in real time, if something isn't done about it.
Ollie: We've got a lot of positive things, I think, because she released the photo and because she showed the world. That's how we got a lot of our civil rights and we got a lot more people having an understanding and coming on board to fight for the rights and to fight for a lynching bill against those types of crimes. They felt a need for it. So I think it was an educating moment. It was a reality check for many as well.
Marissa: At the same time, you know, as Mr. Salsbury, he said, you know, you can't tell people how to channel their grief. // We've seen it in over the many, many years of mass shootings where you have families whose become anti-gun violence advocates who, some of them run for Congress.
AP clip: I am an unwilling participant in this movement. I would not have signed up for this, but I am here today for my son, Trayvon Martin.//
Marissa: You've seen people find ways to channel their grief. And it's also okay. If someone does not wish to channel their grief in a way that puts them in the public's eye because in doing so, that means that they are susceptible to having even more members of the media, just like ourselves, asking them questions hoping for interviews. It just keeps putting them out there when sometimes people need space to grieve.
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Marissa: Emmett's cousins, they said, you know, it could maybe help. But at the same time change takes time. And they said it took them a long time to recognize that they wanted to step up, that they really wanted to. Be the best stewards possible of Emmett's name, maybe till mobile, his legacy and what she did at that time. So those are the big things that they've come to realize as they've been trying to do that activism work in terms of keeping Emmett's name alive. But it's tough. It doesn't come without trauma and having to, in some ways, having to compartmentalize some of that trauma from not only remembering what, how you were, where you were when you first heard that he died, but also having to relive that every single time.
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Gustavo: Yeah. And it does take time sometimes. I mean, look just what a couple of years ago, president Biden finally signed a law that bans lynching in the United States.
Marissa: Yeah, that was only in March that that happened. And it took centuries for that to even be a thing. And I think people forget how we know Congress moves very slow, particularly if they don't feel motivated to do anything. And I think in a lot of ways, as people continue to think about how we need this Emmett Till Moment. And again, as Emmett's family members said, as a couple of other folks in my stories said, it's not as if change is going to happen overnight. Even after people see these photos.
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Marissa: We are seeing images of police brutality and violence. We are seeing, just variety of different violence from at various levels of institutions that are not necessarily affecting. People so much to the point where we're changing laws and policies and systems. So I think that's another thing that Emmett's family really wants people to keep in mind as we have these discussions as a community is understanding that the change might not happen right away. It might be in a year, five years, it could be another century.
Gustavo: Marissa. Thank you so much for this conversation.
Marissa: Thank you.
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Gustavo: And that's it for this episode of the times daily news from the LA times, Ashley Brown and Shannon Lynn, where the half-ass on this episode and Mike Heflin mixed and mastered it. Our is produced by Shannon Lynne, Denise Guetta, Kasha Sallian David Aledo and Ashley Brown.
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