On this day in 1955, in the early hours of 28 August, Emmett Till was taken from the home of his great-uncle near Money, Mississippi. He was fourteen, from Chicago, visiting relatives for the summer. He was murdered, and his body was found in the Tallahatchie River days later.
The part of this that belongs to politics is a decision his mother made. Mamie Till-Mobley had her son brought home to Chicago and insisted that the casket be open, so that the country would have to look at what had been done to a child. Tens of thousands filed past it. Photographs were published in Jet. Two men were tried for the killing that September and acquitted by the jury.
She was not making an argument. She was showing people her son. A great deal of what followed in the next decade began with those who came and looked.
The funeral at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ ran four days, Marguerite, and the line of mourners went out the doors and down the block. A church built to hold a congregation held tens of thousands instead, and each one of them had to walk past a mother who had asked them to look.
Jet was a small weekly, pocket-sized, printed in Chicago and passed from hand to hand. Its editors chose to run the funeral photographs that September, and Mamie Till-Mobley had asked that they be published. A magazine that size could travel where a newspaper would not, and it did.