The Witness of Emmett Till

Emmett Till. Do you know his name? Do you know this person? Have you seen his face? Perhaps… perhaps not. Until a few short years ago neither had I. But we should. Emmett Till is credited with being one of the most significant persons in the Civil Rights Movement.

What did Emmett Till do to receive such notice? Here are the facts as I understand them. In 1955, a 14 year old Emmett Till left Chicago for relatives in Mississippi. He took a break from picking cotton, along with several other teenagers, to enjoy some refreshments and cool off at a grocery store owned and operated by a white couple. The reports from the kids outside were that he whistled at the wife. Several days later Emmett Till was forcibly removed from his family’s home. He was brutally beaten. One of his eyes was gouged out. He was shot through the head. A 75 pound cotton gin fan was tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was dumped into the Tallahatchie River to be hidden away from family and the world as though Emmett Till was less than a person; underserving of the basic right to life. And that final indignity, being weighed down in the Tallahatchie, could have deprived his family of ever knowing what end he had come to. Except for close family and friends, there would have been no memory of Emmett Till; his body lost to the river and the motions time.

But somebody didn’t forget Emmett Till. Three days later Emmett Till’s decomposing body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. His body was delivered to his mother in Chicago. Mamie Till was a single mother- a widow.

On September 2, 1955, Mamie was photographed collapsing at the train station where she received the partially decomposed and disfigured body of her son. On September 3, Emmett Till’s body was taken to Chicago’s Roberts Temple Church of God for viewing and funeral services. In spite of the horrible condition of Emmett Till’s body, Mamie Till insisted on having an open casket funeral so that everyone could witness the brutality and evil inflicted on her son. This is all that Emmett Till had to do to raise the awareness of a nation: to wake from a false peace the conscience of millions of indifferent people.

The best count we have is that legalized abortion has created over 56,000,000 Emmett Tills. These babies were brutally killed. Their bodies have been dumped into garbage bins and incinerators that they may remain nameless and faceless to the world. Non-persons to be forever forgotten. As if that indignity weren’t enough, we’ve recently learned their dismembered body parts are sometimes sold to the highest bidder. Of no value in life, but a precious commodity in death.

There were certainly many Emmett Tills in the world before 1955, so a great deal of evil persisted before the murder of this one person. How many more Emmitt Tills will it take to end abortion? Would more open casket funerals revealing the broken bodies of babies from the womb bring us to that end sooner? I wonder...