The mood following the verdict in the case of Florida v. George Zimmerman is not politics as usual.
While some are touting Zimmerman’s court victory as a win for gun rights, and others wonder what all the fuss is about, there are millions of others who are in mourning.
Many African Americans are mourning not only the loss of a seventeen year-old boy on his way home from the store, but mourning for all our boys. Grieving because we no longer know what to tell our children, fearing who might be tracking their footsteps if they walk freely in the world.
Black America in ‘mourning’
So when I think about this process of mourning, I think immediately of another moment of mourning a boy killed in the deep South almost sixty years ago.
In the summer of 1955 Emmett Till was just 14 years old when his mother, Mamie Till, sent him south to Money, Mississippi to spend the summer with his uncle, Mose Wright, and his young cousins.
So Till, who had been born in Chicago, was a bit out of place and out of step with the racial mores in Mississippi. The rules of Jim Crow insisted on a strict etiquette of submission on the part of black people, particularly black men and black boys. Under the threat of lynch law, black men and boys were expected never to have any kind of personal flirtations or sexual relationships with white women. Such unwritten proscriptions were so strict that most black men and boys were expected never even to look directly at a white woman, or otherwise be perceived as being too sexually forward.
It was this myth of the black male rapist that undergirded the extra- legal lynchings of black people in the American South. One 1899 lynching victim’s corpse was decorated with a placard that read, “We must protect our Southern White Women” even though the victim had not assaulted any woman.
It was this dangerous climate that Till entered in the summer of 1955. His mother had warned him not to even look at a white woman or girl, she had insisted that he call any white person ma’am or sir in order to avoid trouble. She did not tell her son about these warnings because she believed they were right, but rather she sought to protect her son from the harm that could have easily come his way in the segregated South.
But one afternoon, Till traveled into town to buy sweets and soda with his friends and cousins, and seemingly violated one of the unwritten rules and whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the wife of the store-owner. Bryant reported the incident to her husband Roy. Roy Bryant and his half-brother J.W. Milam later recounted that they kidnapped, brutally tortured, and then shot Till in the head. They disposed of his body in the Tallahatchie River tying a cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire.
The Bravery of Mamie
Although two black witnesses, including Till’s uncle Mose Wright came forward to tie Bryant and Milam to the killing, Till’s mother, Mamie Till was also called to the stand in the show trial against Emmett Till’s killers to identity her son’s body. The defense accused Till of being at the center of an elaborate conspiracy working with the NAACP to use another dead body to stir up trouble in Mississippi. The trial was a foregone conclusion. The jury of all white men quickly railroaded through a not guilty verdict lest they fail to protect white womanhood.
But the trial only came after Mamie Till publicized her son’s murder by holding an open casket public viewing of her son’s mutilated and distended body. News of Till’s murder reached a national and international audience when pictures of Till’s corpse were published in Jet magazine. Many of the thousands who attended the public viewing and millions who read of his killing demanded that a trial take place.
So it would be Mamie Till despite her personal grief over the death of her son who would take the story of the case further, demanding that federal authorities bring charges in the case after Bryant and Milam confessed to the killing in the pages of Look magazine. It would be a national mourning that made the Till case a touchstone for a generation that had been encouraged by progress in the push for civil rights, and yet devastated by a blatant miscarriage of justice in a southern court.
Pride in Trayvon’s parents
This time we are mourning for a boy from Miami, visiting his father in Sanford, Florida, unaware of the racial terrain in a neighborhood with some crime and an overzealous neighborhood watchman, driven by assumptions. While I am almost sure Trayvon Martin’s parents, Tracy Martin and Sabrina Fulton, talked with him about being cautious and respectful if approached by the police, I’m sure none of their advice prepared him for being followed by George Zimmerman.
We are mourning because Martin’s death at the end of Zimmerman’s gun was initially dismissed by the police as a Stand Your Ground case of self defense, Florida’s version of an ALEC sponsored law that unlike most self defense laws does not require that self defense is the last resort of someone who cannot escape the altercation. We are mourning that any fistfight might turn into justifiable homicide.
We are proud that Martin’s parents had the courage to publicize their son’s death in order to push for a trial, but we are mourning because unequal justice still seems to be the norm. We are disheartened because we know a Florida woman, Marissa Alexander, is not allowed to stand her ground against an ex-husband with a documented history of abuse, but Zimmerman was found by the court to be justified in believing he needed to kill an unarmed stranger.
And sadly, despite all the changes that have occurred over the past five decades, many of us are mourning, worried about what we should tell to our children that might just keep them safe, as if some set of behaviors could prevent them from being perceived as a threat. We mourn for all our boys.
But like Mammie Till we must not stay in this place of sorrow. We must take heart and like Mammie Till demand that federal action take place when a state fails to make the case. Like the Till generation we must make sure that Trayvon Martin’s death is a not just another story about black men killed in unjust circumstance. We must remember them all as we move to make this tragedy into a catalyst for making this a freer and safer nation for all Americans - Blair L. M. Kelley is an associate professor at North Carolina State University..
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