I was a young child when my mother first talked to me about Emmett Till. It was not in the same manner that black parents today regularly instruct their children on how to avoid death by cop. Mom’s casual talks with me, her eldest child, were more of a lesson on the ways of the south where she had grown up during the Jim Crow years.
When relatives or other visitors came to call at our Washington, DC home, and their conversation turned to Till’s murder in Mississippi, even though I had been sent out of the room during the “grown folks conversation” I became proficient at eavesdropping. And at an early age, I was captivated by the tale of the tragic and senseless murder of a 14-year-old boy who didn’t know his place in a racist society. To this day I remain fixated on the Emmett Till story.