News Tip: Emmett Till Case Worth Pursuing, Duke Professor Says
"We keep telling this story, in part, because it is unfinished," says Karla Holloway
The announcement that the Justice Department is re-examining the murder of Emmett Till offers hope for an ending to a case that "has haunted America for the past 50 years," said a Duke University professor.
"We keep telling this story, in part, because it is unfinished," said Karla Holloway, professor of English and African and African American Studies and dean of the Humanities and Social Sciences. "If the reopened investigation moves him partly from this memory to judicial redress, even these many years later, that matters."
Till, an African-American teenager murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after he allegedly whistled at a white woman, was a reminder for black Americans that their children "were pitifully and despairingly near death," said Holloway, author of the book, "Passed On: African American Mourning Stories."
In her book, Holloway says that ways of dying are just as much a part of black identity as ways of living, and that the vulnerability of African Americans to untimely death is inextricably linked to how black culture represents itself and is represented.
"Because his mother left his casket open so that the world could see what had been done to her child, Emmett Till's death became iconographic in the Civil Rights movement," said Holloway, who wrote about the cultural significance of Till's death in "Passed On." "It was, however, more than symbol. It was also a story of a mother's loss, and a grief that Mamie Till Mobley carried bravely through the entirety of her life. She lived courageously despite the anguish of that mourning -- her life's work dedicated to our remembering her son."
It is appropriate that one of the most graphic examples of racism in the 20th century be revisited for the lessons it conveys, "as today's images of torture and abuse make evident," Holloway said.