The power of moral revulsion

How photos of Emmett Till's brutalized body helped launch the civil rights movement

Kneeling police officers.
(Image credit: EVA MARIE UZCATEGUI/AFP via Getty Images)

This is the editor's letter in the latest issue of the The Week magazine.

In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till of Chicago was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped by a group of white men who accused him of flirting with a white woman. They beat him bloody, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head, mutilated his body, and dumped it in the Tallahatchie River. (The men were later acquitted.) His mother chose to have an open-casket viewing, and to let Jet, an ­African-­American magazine, photograph her son's brutalized remains. "It forced America to see — for the first time — what American racism actually looked like," said Benjamin Saulsberry, director of the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Mississippi. That image, and the shame and disgust it evoked, launched the civil rights era. Years of sit-ins, protests, and confrontations with police finally toppled Jim Crow segregation, and culminated in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And now, after Americans watched a kneeling white police officer nonchalantly crush the life out of George Floyd, we've come to another Emmett Till moment — a reckoning.

The passionate, multiracial protests that have filled the streets of more than 1,000 U.S. cities and towns will not end racism. But as Mahatma Gandhi taught, shame and moral revulsion can be powerful weapons against oppression. In the past week, we have seen police chiefs taking a knee with Black Lives Matter protesters. Cities and Congress are moving toward major reform of policing. A near-insurrection broke out among current and retired generals after President Trump sought to bring in active-duty troops to "dominate" the protesters, à la Tiananmen Square. Confederate statues and flags are finally coming down. In a Monmouth University poll, 76 percent of Americans called racism "a big problem" in the U.S. — up 26 points since 2015. No one can unsee the knee on George Floyd's neck, or unhear his cry, "I can't breathe." Change is slow, and change is wrenching, but change is coming.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
To continue reading this article...
Continue reading this article and get limited website access each month.
Get unlimited website access, exclusive newsletters plus much more.
Cancel or pause at any time.
Already a subscriber to The Week?
Not sure which email you used for your subscription? Contact us
William Falk

William Falk is editor-in-chief of The Week, and has held that role since the magazine's first issue in 2001. He has previously been a reporter, columnist, and editor at the Gannett Westchester Newspapers and at Newsday, where he was part of two reporting teams that won Pulitzer Prizes.