Last week August 28 marked the anniversaries of two major events in the modern Civil Rights Movement that happened eight years apart. On August 28, 1955 fourteen year old Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Mississippi while visiting family there. The Black teenager from Chicago was abducted, tortured, and killed for supposedly making crude remarks to a white woman in a local store. The woman’s husband and another white man were arrested for the murder but quickly acquitted by and all white jury. After their acquittal, the men were interviewed for a story in Look magazine. They admitted their guilt, because they knew that they could not be tried again for the same crime. Just last month, the Washington Post reported that the author of that article withheld information about additional white suspects who likely participated in Emmett’s torture and murder. The article also portrayed the teenager in a negative way meant to appeal to white readers but was later proven to be false. After almost 70 years, the full story of this lynching has yet to emerge. However it became a pivotal event because Emmett’s mother Mamie decided to hold an open casket funeral for her son. The shocking pictures of his mutilated face resulted in a national outrage that helped to spark the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Eight years later on August 28, 1963, the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom took place on the National Mall. Unfortunately, that popular history of that event has been domesticated and reduced to the last speech of the day when Dr. King gave what became known as the “I Have a Dream Speech.” The speech itself has been used in distorted ways to promote a vague kind of color blindness instead of the revolutionary call to racial justice that was at the heart of Dr. King’s actual words. Too often forgotten are the other speakers, musicians, and organizers who led a peaceful interracial crowd of around 250,000 calling on our nation to take action for racial and economic justice. It was truly a triumphant day but was only one step on the costly road to true equality and justice that we are still traveling.
Remembering these two major events of August 28 call us go deeper than the superficial popular versions of our nation’s racial history. The stories of both tragedy and triumph reveal that progress toward racial justice is not inevitable or spontaneous. Rather it is the result of ongoing commitment by people and communities willing to pay the cost of facing and enduring the backlash by forces that continue to resist the changes necessary for “liberty and justice for all.” The two videos posted below provide context that is often overlooked for August 28 1955 and 1963.