‘How a mother’s love overcame hate to inspire our history’

TW: This piece contains mentions of racial violence

I’m an anniversarist – a made-up word that allows me to make connections to the past through history.

This year on August 28 in Bristol and Britain we will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Bristol Bus Boycott movement that allowed Black and Asian people to drive the buses.

On the same day in 1963 in the USA and across the world, global celebrations will mark the anniversary of Dr Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech. Before these events on August 28 1955, came a dark moment of terror, that led to those two great social justice achievements.

On this landmark day, the mutilated body of Emmett Till was found in the Tallahassee River, Mississippi. Till’s murder is classified as a lynching and memorialised at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) at their heart-wrenching memorial in Alabama to those who have been lynched.

Thanks to the work of the campaigner Ida B Welles and the EJI only last year was the act of lynching – an act to conspire to cause serious violence or murder involving a hate crime – outlawed in America and named after Till.

Till centres on the role of his mother Mamie Till-Mobley who long before television was in many homes, used the media to depict her son’s murder.

Out of her bravery came a re-birth of the civil rights movement. Men like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and Arthur Ashe regarded themselves Emmett Till men, recognising that Till’s death could have happened to any of them as Black boys.

The details are still as shocking as when I first discovered the story, after I had left school. A 14-year-old boy, rounded up by white men at night from the bed of his relatives during a holiday. His alleged crime? Whistling at a white woman in a region where inter-racial marriage was outlawed.

Miscegenation is the official term whose cruelness is told in the film Loving (2016), and the word disgusted the bi-racial President Barack Obama in his book Dreams of My Father.

Centuries of enslavement were followed by Jim Crow laws that not only segregated the Deep South – a coven of confederate southern states – but economically left legacies of sub-standard education, health and low income, making Till’s death prominent but by no means a one-off.

Mrs Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket determined the world would see the full extent of racism through her son’s beaten and bloated body. His corpse had been recovered from the water, weighted down by a cotton gin. The cotton gin was responsible for industrialisation of the slave trade within America creating misery for millions.

Instead of cowering, it galvanised a generation into active non-violent civil-rights duty. Later in 1955, Rosa Parkes would begin the Montgomery Bus Boycott bringing into prominence Dr Martin Luther King who was also deeply affected by Till’s murder. This influenced many movements and individuals across of the world including Paul Stephenson and Roy Hackett in Bristol.

Roger Griffith with Martin Luther King III (Dr King’s son on march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama 2012)

This long overdue film by Chinonye Chukwu (director of the haunting death penalty drama Clemency) gives an opportunity to see the reluctant heroine who inspired future generations.

It adds to the canon of historical cinematic-dramas in the Deep-South that have given me inspiration to visit the horrors from history in search of hope and similar stories of salvation, including Mississippi Burning, 4 Little Girls, Selma and 12 Years a Slave.

In 1939 Billie Holliday sang the melancholic Strange Fruit and in 2020 Reverend Al Sharpton called the death of George Floyd a modern-day lynching. Floyd’s murder witnessed on social media, led to global Black Lives Matter protests.

Storytelling and art can reach and teach us much about our past that activates action. Whether you are a survivor of racist abuse or a champion of social justice remember the grace under extreme grief of Mamie Till-Mobley as we shine a light on several heroic collective struggles this year.

Dr Roger Griffith MBE is a writer, lecturer at UWE Bristol, CEO of his community consultancy Creative Connex CIC and author of My American Odyssey: From the Windrush to the White House. 

Main photo: Ellie Pipe

Read next:

• Bristol Bus Boycott leaders to be granted Freedom of the City
• Alfred Fagon bust among black history memorials given listed status
• ‘Harrowing’ results of inquiry into racism in Bristol’s cricket clubs

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