till, whose 1955 murder gave rosa parks the courage to sit down and martin luther king, jr. the courage to stand up. i would like, first, if i could thank the sponsor for their generous support of great lives and it's this kind of support that makes the series possible as a public service to our community. our speaker is author of the 2019 book titled "remembering emmett till" which will be on sale at the conclusion of tonight's program. dr. tell, who has a doctorate from penn state, has won numerous awards for teaching, and since 2014, he focused in particular on the legacy of the murder of emmett till in which endeavor he has been a long-time partner with emmett till memorial commission of the county. his scholarship is written for broad public audiences and he worked extensively with the tell memorial convention. in addition to his work on emmett till, dr. tell continues to public on its intersection with modern architecture. he's a prolific public speaker. since 2014 he nearly has given public talks on the legacy of the till murder, bringing that story to public libraries, schools, prisons, town halls, local book stores and elite universities and including the university of mary washington. it's a pleasure to welcome to the great lives podium, dr. dave tell. >> good evening. thanks to bill for that introduction. thanks to ali for all the help getting here. you here at the university of mary washington have an amazing lecture series and it's an honor to be part of it. on august 28th, 1955, emmett till passed from a life of joyful obscurity to a death of undreamt fame. if the reverend wheeler parker were here with us tonight, he would remind us before till was an icon or martyr, he was also a boy and a jokester. reverend parker is a cousin of emmett till. his childhood best friend and the last living eyewitness to the abduction and murder, and he is also, all-till related, my true north. you heard him talk about the fun loving bicycle boy that was emmett till, and you heard him talk about the dark hours of the mississippi night when two of till's killers went through the house bed to bed pausing to interrogate parker before finding till in the next room. it's important to start with reverend parker, because most of us, especially me, only know till as an icon. the boy whose lynching inspired a generation and launched a movement. we know him as a story that pushed rosa parks into action, as a tortured body on the pages of "jet" magazine or as a turning point in the life of john lewis, and we knew, as his mother has said, that he did not die in vain. but if the reverend parker were here, he would remind us that we have lost the joyful obscurity of those first 14 years. so in what follows, i will give you a glimpse into the long and dramatic after life of emmett till. my talk is not so much a biography of the boy. for that you would need the reverend parker, as it is a biography of his story, because for 66 1/2 years people have been telling till's story or ignoring it or bending it or selling it. you might know what happened to emmett till in 1955, and if you don't, it's fine, i will bring you up to speed. you might not know the ways the story has been suppressed, altered and sold since 1955. suppressed, altered and sold, those three key verbs are at the heart and core of the biography of emmett till's story, because time and again the chance to make a buck has fueled the out right suppression of the story or the alteration of key details. so by the end of the evening i hope you will agree with me that there's simply no way to look back at the history of emmett till's storytelling and not conclude that whatever else the till story might be, it's also a commodity, a commodity that has been told more for its cash value than for its moral lessons. i think you will agree, too, that the money made on its telling has too often been spent in the service of white supremacy. so this evening i will share with you three stories about how till's story has been hijacked. i will conclude with a small glimpse of how the story is being reclaimed. as i tell these stories please don't forget before till was an icon of the movement and before his story was bought and sold, he was a 14-year-old kid that liked bikes. to get us started and to make sure we are on the same page, let me take you back to the summer of 1955. at that time emmett till was an african american boy living in chicago in august of that year while visiting his cousins in the mississippi delta. he whistled at carolyn bryant, the 21-year-old white shop keeper of bryant's grocery and meat market in the heart of the mississippi delta. for that three days later he was lynched, which in this case means he was kidnapped, tortured, shot and dropped in a river. five days later the body was back in chicago where hundreds of thousands of people saw it. among them, the photographer, david jackson, whose picture of the bloated and beaten body circulated so widely that you could probably picture it in your head even if you have never seen it. three weeks after the photograph, two of the murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury, and three months after the trial martin luther king, jr. heard till's story told from the pulpit of his own dexter baptist church in montgomery, and he never forgot it. eight years later, june 3rd, 1963, king was in detroit and he was still talking about emmett till. you might recognize his language. king said, i have a dream this afternoon that there will be a day that we will no longer face the atrocities that emmett till no longer has to face. i have a dream. two months later dr. king gave his dream speech a second time and it worked so well in detroit he tried it again from the steps of the lincoln memorial, and when he gave the speech, first, it became famous in all of american history, and a second thing happened, the reference to emmett till was cut. the moment the speech became the document of the civil rights movement, till lost his place in that document. i don't imagine king cut till intentionally. i think of the dream speech as a jazz performance, it's a little bit different every time. but intentional or not, the eraser of till proved all too prophetic. his story was never well told, in fact -- get this, 49 years and 11 months separate the murder from the first dollar ever dropped on till commemorations in the state of mississippi. in 2005, a local group of citizens in tallahatchie county decided 50 years of silence was intolerable, so they organized and fundraised and used $15,000 of morgan freeman's money to do something that never had been done before, they told till's story on the landscape by putting up signs. no sooner were those signs put up they were plagued by vandalism, and it was persistent and targeted. this is the first sign ever to acknowledge emmett till. it lasted a matter of weeks before it was painted. this sign stands in front of the grocery and meat market. if you could read the writing, it would tell you that was ground zero of the civil rights movement. in 2017, the sign was defaced with acid. these two aluminum poles stand at the site where till's body was pulled from the water. a sign was erected in 2008 to mark the spot. it was stolen so quickly that i don't even have a picture of the pre- stolen sign. but the non-profit group i work with replaced the sign within months, and from 2008 to 2016, this sign accumulated 317 bullet holes. it was removed in 2016 and replaced by this sign. if you are keeping track at home, this is the third sign to mark the spot where till's body was pulled from the water, and the first sign stolen, and the second one filled with bullet holes. this one in 2018, do you know how long it lasted before it, too, was filled with bullet holes? the answer is 32 days. this picture broke in the summer of 2019. these are three fraternity brothers from the university of mississippi posing with assault rifles and hunting rifles in front of the sign. we will come back to the vandalism at the end. for now i want to note that in 2014 the vandalism became so targeted and persistent that emmett till, the non-profit in tallahatchie county called the two-day summit on the topic of telling till's story, and the till family was there and the fbi was there, and against all odds, i was there. right before i left i agreed to help the non-profit make a smartphone app to tell the story of emmett till. our thinking was so simple, right? if it's easy to shoot a roadside marker in tallahatchie county, it's more difficult to shoot a smartphone app. this launched in the summer of 2019 and it's called the emmett till memory project. if i can ask you everything, please download it. it's free where you get your apps, and every download helps us get money to make the next version. we got feedback on the app and they told us our content was stop on but we needed more shine, an augmented reality, so for the first time we hired graphic designers from the rhode island school of design and we have software developers and we last week pitched the till family on the newest version of the emmett till memory project, the smartphone app. they gave it the green light which means the only thing that stands between us and the new app is half a million dollars. that's a significant hurdle, but we are grant writing and fundraising for it as we speak. as i was researching the app, i was driving around the mississippi delta and i kept hearing stories that i never had heard before and that caught me off guard because i had been telling emmett till stories for over a decade by this point. but the stories i was hearing as i drove around were not about the murder, per se, they were about the story of the per dur and the way the story changed over time, about who changed it and to what ends. and these stories became my book. "remembering emmett till" is stories about how people changed the facts of the murder to benefit themselves politically and financially. each story is about how racism and the pursuit of money are changing the story we think we know about till's murder. i will conclude by returning once more to the vandalized signs, and some of the absolutely incredible responses to the vandalism, and a few reflections on what all this emmett till storytelling teaches us about our own racial climate. so the first story is about sunflower county. sunflower county, mississippi, and the only thing you need to know about sunflower county to make sense -- first, that till was killed in sunflower county, and it's one county that has no memorials, no signs, no nothing, and that's counterintuitive. you would think that the murder site gets the premiere commemorative investment, but the opposite is actually the case. and it didn't just happen that way. and this story will tell you why it happened. it starts at 7:00 p.m. on the night of october 28th, 1955. that's two months after the murder and one month after the trial. on that night the freelance journalist, william bradford huey met with two of the murderers, their wives and their lawyers to share a bottle of whisky and swap stories. you see, huey, he's the journalist, and he wanted to tell the story of till to a magazine and he knew the only way he could publish another story about the murder is if he had the story from the murderers' mouth, so he paid them and he paid their lawyers for in exchange they signed consent and release forms that look like this. you don't need the fine print, but i will direct your attention to the bottom where it's signed by jw milan, the murderer. now, in october 12, he told his editor he knew four men were involved in the murder and boasted he could name them all. by october 23, he could only obtain waivers from the two men that were already tried and therefore no in legal jeopardy, and he wrote his boss another letter, he said there were not four men in the abduction party, there were only two, and thus because he could only obtain two consent and release forms, the murder parter shrank from four people to two people, and this would move the murder site across county lines. during the trial, a guy named willie reid, a sharecropper testified for the prosecution that the murder happened in this barn near the down of drew in sunflower county. and this was true, but william bradford huey could not tell the story because the only reason the murder happened in sunflower county was that his brother, leslie, there managed the plantation on which there was a barn sufficiently isolated for the purposes of the night, but leslie had not been tried. he did not sign a release form, so he could not be implicated in huey's story. so william bradford huey moved the murder site 16.5 miles east to an abandon spot along the tallahatchie river in tallahatchie county. his article game out in january of 1956, and at that time it was an unprecedented geography. because huey was the first person to suggest a two-county murder, and he was kidnapped before being killed and disposed of in tallahatchie county. the influence of the story is easy to track. you just have to follow the maps. before huey's story -- that is before january of 1956, the map looked like this. note, sunflower county is in blue and the barn is clearly identified. the amazing part is what happened after huey's story was published in january of 1956. every single map of the murder published including this one from 1988 and this one from 2010 placed the murder in tallahatchie county and left sunflower county off the map entirely. now, who cares? when i met till's cousin, simian wright, the late simian wright in 2014, he tells me it doesn't matter where kill was -- till was killed, and mr. wright refused to travel to sunflower county. in 2010, when he published his own account of the murder he left sunflower county off of his map. i get his point, we don't want to get so lost in the mnuchin of the murder that we don't want to forget the issue of racism, but the only reason sunflower county was eliminated from the itinerary was to protect one of the murderers, and i am not trying to evade the all-important question of race, but i am suggesting racism affected more of the story than we ever acknowledged. even these maps are products of racism. why? because claiming that till was killed in tallahatchie county is another way of saying that only two men were guilty and both of them faced a jury of their peers, and although none of that is true, for those that visit the delta it's too easy to remember that tallahatchie county is packed with memorials, while the site is unmarked on the premises of a local dentist. that's it for story number one. but can you see how racism and the pursuit of profit are shifting the story for till's final night for 50 years. every single map was wrong. because "look" magazine would only way huey if he had release forms for the people he named in his story. all right. the next story is about bryan's grocery and meat market. this is where emmett till whistled and this is what the building looked like at the time of the murder in august of 1955. the years have not been kind to bryant's grocery. before i tell you this story, i want to click through some images. this is the building in the '80s, the '90s, the 2000s. it was hurricane katrina that took the rough of the grocery and a portion of its north wall. this is the fall of 2017. the winter of 2018. this is one of my favorites from 2011. if you remember that sign i showed you in the beginning, the one scrubbed with acid. i told you that sign claims that this build something ground zero of the civil rights movement. isn't it a little bit odd that the building marked as ground zero of the civil rights movement would be allowed to fall into ruin? it didn't just happen that way. it was intentional. this is the story of how ground zero of the movement fell into ruin. although you can't tell by looking, in 2011 the town of money, that's the name of the town, it's a weird town, money, mississippi, the town of money in 2011 was the beneficiary of a civil rights historical grants right. the grant went not to bryant's grocery and meat market, but rather it went to the gulf station that sits precisely 67 feet south of the crumbling grocery, because bryant's was crumbling, and because ben roy's had a default lecture site where they could learn their civil rights history, and the application -- i am reading now, quote, it's very likely the events that transpired at bryant's grocery were discussed underneath the front canopy of the adjacent gas station, end quote. and with nothing more than that the mississippi department of archives and history gave the grant for the restoration of ben roy's. the restoration was completed in 2014, and it is beautiful. but it makes no reference to emmett till, civil rights history or the building to its north. the original gas pumps were reinstalled, and ben roy's is a reminder or perhaps better a vision of what day-to-day life in the mississippi delta might have looked like had racism not coursed through every facet of that life. but these were civil rights dollars? the grant was funded by the emmett till murder. making matters more complex, ben roy's gas station and bryant's grocery is both owned by the family. why was a historical rights grant given to a piece with no history, especially when such a site is next door owned by the grantees. and first there's the herb of finances. the entirety of ben roy's was restored for less than one-third of what it would have cost to stablize the grocery store, so maybe it was just a better deal. second, and this is where it gets sticky, the grantees are the children of ray treufle, an unrepennant juror, and he bought everything except the baptist church and was an active member in the local democratic party, and until his dying day he never lost his convictions the murders were innocent and the body was planted by the naacp. third, and this is what i want to focus on. nostalgia, or maybe white now nostalgia is a better world. the restoration of ben roy's, it's a story of a simpler time characterized by a "leave it to beaver" goodness. it acknowledges the fact of segregation but not the violence of racism. it's a story of interracial harmony so profound that it's hard to imagine the violence visited on the 14-year-old emmett till. here's the story of ben roy's as it's narrated in their grant application. the family wrote, a restoration will allow visitors to step back into type in 1955 into rural mississippi. it was not just a service station, but a front stoop for the community, a place where locals went for refreshments and conversation. markers of racial hierarchy would not be absent from the restoration on the north side of the building. the family promised the restrooms would be marked colored and white as they were during segregation. the restored building was to become something of a visitor's center or cultural center. these are their words. but the application made segregation itself seem rather charming. a jukebox once stood on the porch, and it said on weekend nights blacks and whites gathered alike to, quote, shed their work blues and enjoy the jukebox at ben roy's. my fear is that ben roy's took civil rights money and invested in the period piece designed to evoke nostalgia for racially per miscue wus front stoop saturday nights that never happened. it's important to remember the first businesses in the delta to be boycotted during the civil rights movement were white owned service stations. before lunch counters, bus stations or swimming pools became a thing, gas stations were the first lightning rods of black inequality and it's difficult for me to imagine that a front porch jukebox could overcome the racial charge attached to them. so don't be fooled by the nostalgia of ben roy's. i don't know if it actually attracted integrated socializers, but i do know the jim crow signage that once marked the bathrooms was never restored. in all honesty, that was probably a wise choice, but without the signs the service station never retains the emmett till. it's a beautiful building, but its beauty was funded by unacknowledged racial violence. my next sentence is one that i have had editors cut, but i don't see my editors here tonight so you get it. i can't even look at ben roy's without fearing that it might not be the perfect model of what red cap trump supporters might see when they look backwards to a once great america. they see gas stations and more broadly an entire american infrastructure made possible by economy's of race but unmarked by the legacies of violence because leaving the violence unmarked like ben roy's leaves it unmarked is the only possible way to hold up mid century america as a bastion of greatness. and it was paid for literally by till's murder, but the final product sanitizes the history of the delta and makes till's murder seem unlikely. can you see how once again racism and their pursuit of money are changing the story of till's murder. people often ask me why till's story was so poorly told for so long? there are a lot of answers and a lot of right answers, but part of the answer has to be that the story was actively suppressed because suppression is the only accurate way to describe what the tribbles did with ben roy's service station. one more slide here on ben roy's. this is a tweet from the journalist, johan jones. i don't know if you know johan jones, in 2019 when he posted this tweet, he now works for the "reid out" blog on msnbc. in 2019, he and i travelled to mississippi together. he got there a day before i did. on that day he visited bryant's grocery and posted this tweet. he says powerful first day in mississippi. here is bryant's grocery, and then he posted a picture of the wrong building. he showed up and he saw one building in ruin and one building restored, and he thought if this is ground zero the movement, obviously it must be the restored building. but he was wrong. to his credit, the sign on the left side of the tweet that tells the story of bryant's grocery, this sign is 33 1/2 feet from each building. it's precisely in the middle. and you know why, right? even if you don't, you know why, because when the county put the sign up they did not want to ask the permission from the family because they put it right-of-way between the buildings, and it was brilliant because it got the sign there, but precisely in the middle. if a guy that makes his living telling stories of the history got it wrong, think of taking a picture of the wrong building. story three is about the town in glendora, mississippi. okay, the first thing to say is that glendora is absolutely saturated with memorials. the tiny town has five streets and 18 signs. okay, five streets and 18 signs dedicated to the till story, and along with the signs the only museum in the world dedicated entirely to the till story, and it's called the ethic museum. it stands for the emmett till -- it tells a unique version of till's story on two accounts. first, while virtually ever 20th century history of hill's murder suggests that the murders dropped the body in the tallahatchie river. and it's talhatchie river. according to this account, the bayou then carried till's body from glendora three miles from the river where it was recovered. second, while no historian has been able to say with certainty where the murder obtained the fan with which they waved down till's body in the water, the glendora museum claims it was stolen from the glendora cotton gin and the next door neighbor of confessed murderer j.w. milum. at issue here are the bridge, the gin and by extension the complicity of kimball. now while these finer points on till's story may seem like academic minutia to glendora residents sometimes seems the very future of their town hinges on where till's body was dropped in the water and with what fan it was waved down. in 2010 the mississippi development authority sent a team of economic development experts to glendora and their charge was to des have a plan to rescue the town from poverty. but they struggled to find solutions aside from the unrealistic idea that the town turned the snake infested land along the bayou into, quote, river front property. the development authorities only other proposal was that glendora capitalize on its connection to the till murder. more commemoration they said would bring more tourists and more tourists would bring more money. none of this was news to johnny b. thomas. since 2005 the mayor has been promoting a narrative of the murder in which till's body was dropped with a fan from the local gym. the mayor has a powerful antagonist or the mdah. that state agency has invested more money into emmett till commemoration than any other organization but they simply do not believe that till was dropped into the bayou or that the fan was stolen from a local gym. so while the mdah has funded virtually every other till request in the last 20 years, including ben roy's, they refuse to fund glendora. from the perspective, they may be plausible but they are not v verifiable. because it is a prerequisite for state funding, the mayor has one state agency, the development authority, telling him to invest in till commemoration and another state agency, archives and history refusing to fund his efforts to do so. without the support of archives and history mayor thomas has gotten creative. the united states department of agriculture awarded a community connect broadband grant to glendora funded $325,000 the intent was to bring broadband internet connectivity. he used the usda money to convert the old cotton gin into a computer lab and that was part of the plan. but after the grant was approved, he fired his contractor, hired several members of his own family and a number of state prisoners to construct the world's first emmett till museum, the emmett till historic intrept center which was also located in the gym. it approved the expenses, it does not seem that their money was being used to build a museum because in the 647 pages preserved by the usda, including the application, labor contracts, invoices and correspondents, the name of emmett till is not once. after the grant ran out glendora could not pay the bills and the internet service was discontinued. the museum on the other hand is going strong. it is maintained on a day-to-day basis and this is a mouthful by the glendora economic corporation founded by mayor thomas and known to locals as jedco. the town has assigned most, if not all public business to the nonprofit. jedco pays city workers and operates 24 section eight apartments and operates the museum. the public housing funnels about $100,000 a year of federal hud money into the nonprofit. with this money, the nonprofit maintains the apartments, pays city workers and critically subsidizes the till museum. in the most literal way possible, it's the poverty of the towns people keeping the doors of the museum open. it was build with usda money and it was maintained with hud money and access to both of these pots hinges on poverty rather than history. when i'm in the state capital of jackson a couple hours south of glendora, the staff at archives and history has cautioned me to treat mayor thomas' claims with a grain of salt from their perspective. what matters is the provability of history. since it's difficult to claim, archives and history has chosen not to fund glendora. but the closer you get to glendora the more it seems poverty matters more than provability and this is where mayor thomas shines. even without the support of archives and history. he has manmanaged to leverage t poverty of the town the very thing the mda told him he needed but the mdah refused to fund. to be sure the unanswered questions was emmett till actually dropped and was kimball involved? perhaps. i put money on some of that. but it's neither my place or more point to weigh in on the truthfulness of these claims. what i want to focus on are the way poverty and revenue in the mississippi delta is changing the story we think we know about till's final night. thomas has been able to leverage the town's poverty to support the museum and the museum in turn supports glendora's plausible but unviable theories. had he been healthy little reason to stick to this version of the story. the black bayou bridge would be lost to memory and kimball would rarely appear in the stories of till's final night. but glen dora is not wealthy and poverty is reshaping the story of till's murder. story about kimball and the bridge continue to circulate. sustained and preserved by nothing more than the poverty of the town. that's your three stories. in conclusion, it's kind of a long conclusion so don't get too anxious. for look magazine william bradford huey and for the family and at times for mayor thomas it seems like the till story was first and foremost a commodity. a story to be told more for its cash value than its moral lessons. one of the lessons of this evening, i hope, is what happens when stories become commodities. in each case, questions of truth have taken a back seat to questions of fundability and the story of till's murder has either been altered or suppressed. but we can't end here because the story of emmett till is still being told. and it is being reclaimed from the likes of huey and the dribbles. to give you a sense of this. i want to take you back to this sign. the vandalized sign with which we began. it may seem excuse me, it may seem like an odd place to turn for a sense of hope, but the vandalism has spurred some of the most creative and powerful emmett till story telling that i've encountered. i don't know who shot these signs, but if i ever meet them, i want to tell them that it certainly appears, it certainly appears that they intended the vandalism for evil. but look at all the good that has come from it. let me share quickly just three projects that have inadvertently but very directly been launched by the vandalism. first, emmett till now has the country's only bulletproof roadside marker. it weighs 500 pounds. costs $1,200 and is made of three-quarter inch harden steel. now, full disclosure. if you comb the archives of small mississippi newspapers you may find an op-ed i wrote back in 2018 arguing that we should not put up a bulletproof sign instead we live the bullet riddled sign standing. i say that because the bulletholes layered on top of till's story seemed like a great way to pull the story into the 21st century. because the bullet holes are powerful effectively charged reminders that we still have not put behind us the racism that cost till his life. i will tell you that as a historian of till's murder one of my deepest convictions is that we must not confine the story of till's murder to 1955. it is a story that is 66 years old and still growing. and honestly the image of till's story on the sign but punctured by bullet holes was just a great way to capture the ongoing drama of the story. i changed my mind in a conversation with a late erica gordon taylor, another cousin of emmett till. she told me, she agreed, first of all, it's important to pull the story into the 21st century. but she told me the sign is too violent and too traumatizing and triggering to leave it standing there not knowing who will stumble upon it. i found that argument compelling so i joined forces with the family. i wrote the text for the bulletproof sign and i spoke at its dedication. and although i came around to replacing the bullet riddled signs, i never lost my conviction that the old signs riddled with bullets held important lessons. so, shortly after we dedicated the bulletproof sign, i published this op-ed in the "new york times." the only thing you need is the title. quote, put the vandalized emmett till signs in museums and low and behold, not long after that, i heard from two amazing curetors and after about a year of work, reckoning with remembrance and grand mall side entrance of the national museum of american history. one of the first questions people ask me about this exhibit, why is it here? if you know the smithsonian landscape you know right next door to the american history is the national museum of african-american history and culture. why isn't that there? first, they have a till exhibit and it's amazing. they don't need another one. but more than that, the smithsonian knows the demographics of their visitors. they know that people go to the african-american museum to see a certain side of american history and those that don't want that side of american history come to the sort of, they come to the american history museum which tends towards the patriotic and the rah, rah go america. as you can see in the background with the 200-foot rendition of the betsy ross flag. but i have to say, i love that they put the sign in the entrance to flag hall because when it was here, it is moved to a different place now. but when it was in flag hall, it was impossible to walk into the museum and see either the star spangled banner in the background or the emmett till sign in the foreground without also seeing the other things. as if to say both of these are parts of american history. and that seems super smart to me. i got to go for the dedication. this is my daughter. on the left is the reverend parker till's cousin and on the right is reverend willy williams the co-chair of the commission that put up the signs. this fall, september 17th, a second major museum exhibition is going to open that features a bullet riddled sign. like the smithsonian, the indianapolis children museum created an entire exhibit around one of the buttal riddled signs and this one is a traveling exhibit. after it opens in indy, it is going to be go to birmingham, and jackson, mississippi and to the atlanta history center. i can't wait. so what do we learn from all of this? after 50 years of silence, an interracial group of citizens joined forces to put up signs. the signs were then stolen, replaced, shot, replaced again, shot again and replaced again. every time local citizens took it upon themselves to tell till's story on the landscape of the mississippi delta, vandals got their guns and transformed markers of the black experience into yet one more reminder of white supremacy. unbowed by this violence, the smithsonian and the indianapolis children's museum are transforming these signs once again by contextuallyizing the signs that tells a new story about racism from 1955 to the present day in these exhibits. the sign making citizens of tallahatchie join mobley as the heroes of till's story. when we remember that mobley opened her son's casket letting the world see what racism had done to her bike riding boy, it is not difficult to understand the sign building and the sign replacing of tallahatchie county as a fulfillment of her dream. so what's the lesson here? as i tell my students at the university of kansas, memorials are the new lunch counters. in the 1960s, lunch counters were iconic sites of racial agitation and for a moment they were prized number one in the fight for civil rights. it was at a lunch counter that bernard lafayette and maryann morgan had detergent poured down their backs. it was at a lunch counter that john lewis and james bevel was nearly suffocated. john salter was attacked with brass knuckles and ann moody were attacked with condiments and norman memphis was beaten while the jackson police looked on. now, hear me out on this one. don't you think that kind of like the lunch counters of old, memorials have become new public sites of racial confrontation? just as memphis norman was once beaten at a lunch counter while the police looked on. in 2017, heather higher was killed just down the road in charlottesville at a memorial while trump looked on later proclaiming that there were very fine people on both sides. and charlottesville was exceptional only in its death toll. in the past year and change, memorials have become protest sites in richmond, st. paul, washington, d.c., chapel hill, birmingham, st. agusten, bentonville, oxford, raleigh, san diego and seattle. from the gulf of mexico to the canadian border and from the atlantic to the pacific, memorials have emerged as the new go-to sites of racial activism. if memorials, sorry, if memorials had become the litmus test of our racial politics, it's because they are a public story telling venues par excellence. they force us to confront basic questions about our past. what stories and whose will be dignified in public space. what stories and whose will become part of the built environment and part of the unquestioned background against which we live our lives. and what stories and whose will be subsidized by tax dollars transmitted by the landscape and preserved by the tenacity of granite, bronze and marble. so when i say memorials are the new lunch counters, i just mean the stories we tell or don't tell about the american past are now on the front lines of the fight for racial justice. so let's end with a tribute to these boys. tyler yarbrough and curtis hill recent graduates from the university of mississippi. students who would not let vandals have the last word, who marched through their campus with this sign and conducted a silent protest at the base of a monument to which they objected. the fact that the police dispersed their protest after five minutes does not take away from the fact that this might be the perfect image of our current racial climate. look at this picture and consider what we see here. at the most abstract we see a fight over whose history is told in public and more precisely we see the story of till's murder in white letters on a purple background punctuated by bullet holes, framed by the confederacy but reclaimed by these students. and we can also learn something about the condition of telling black stories. in this story alone till had to create a landscape that valorizes white history and confront bullts and had to confront the police. if we brought in our perspective a little bit more, till's story had to confront people like william bradford huey and the tribble who were too happy to suppress the story. against all these odds, i think we need to count their short protest as a win. just think of what the till story had to come through to get to this point. finally, this is an image of what the fight for racial justice can look like in the 21st century. it's a fight over what stories we tell in public. that's it. and thank you very much. >> well, now, we'll take some questions from the audience. raise your hand and kelly will find you and if you can stand and ask your question, we'll take as many as we can. >> you said till lived in chicago are any memorials, road signs, et cetera, in chicago? >> yes is the answer to your question. chicago has always been ahead of mississippi in the task of commemorating the murder. so, there is an emmett till school in chicago, there is an emmett till bridge. the home where he lived in downtown chicago in 1955 is currently vacant but there is work afoot to reclaim it. the home where he grew up as a kid next to wheeler parker, which is about a baseball throw west of not o'hare, what is the small airport? midway. a baseball throw from mid way. that home is no longer there but the site is there and it's now paved with bricks and you can buy these bricks in memorial and there is a sign there. about a block from that is the chicago version of an emmett till memorial center. the short answer is, yes, chicago has always been ahead. in one of the brand-new developments really in 2019, 2020, is that the family in chicago has really in unprecedented ways join forces with the nonprofit in mississippi to connect the commemorative work going on in chicago to the commemorative work going on in mississippi. there is even, you can sign this petition online. a current project to create a, what is the word here? a discontinuous national park with sites in both chicago and mississippi dedicated to the memory of emmett till. and i even think you can check me on this. i'm sure the secretary of the interior was there last week to start scouting these sites. >> how long does it take -- >> you're talking about bryant -- so the question is how long has it taken? the owners of the grocery. they've never spoken out. as you might imagine, it is in their best interest to be very quiet and reserved and they are a very reserved and quiet family. the only trebble i have spoken with is two generations removed. it's not entirely generational but partly generational. i do have hopes as the years go by and things in the works right now to try to get this building. there are like carrot tactics and stick tactics to try and save bryant's grocery. but it will happen in spite of the tribbles not through the agency. >> i'm not sure if it will turn into a question. we frequently talk about events like this and the part of black history and that's unfortunate because it is a large part of white history also. inability to come to terms and reconcile our own actions. just something i keep thinking about. i'm not sure. if you want to say something more about that. >> hats helpful, actually. because i think a better term and i use these terms but a better term rather than black history or white history, a better term would probably be difficult history, right. it's important to teach difficult history and, you know, difficult history is under attack these days. think about the legacy or think of the 1619 commission or the 1776, what the response was. it's terribly important that we teach difficult history right now. and that's what the smithsonian is trying to do. kudos to them. >> what was going on in the '70s, '80s and '90s when all the people weren't talking about emmett till and what occurred that now here we are 70 years later, we have tv shows and movies and books and your book and other people's books. what was the catalyzing event, do you think, and what were people doing for 30, 40 years? not talking about it at all. >> it's hard to believe what people don't talk about. so, if you want, if you're into the internet, what do they call where you try to track the frequency of words over time and if you track emmett till, it is statistical verifiable that virtually no one is talking about emmett till. the fact that we live in a culture right now that puts emmett till up front. abc last month ran this massive documentary and screenplay. this is an anomaly. '60s, '70s, '80s there were some people talking but these people were mostly artists and songwriters were thinking about the till story. here's a lesson, though. i'm from kansas city, lawrence. kansas city is an emmett till town. i can explain that, if you're interested. and so like every time a big till thing comes out there is a big event in kansas city and some years ago when anderson's book came out he came to kansas city and did a big talk with alvine sykes with a venue perhaps not this big but almost and it was packed. at the end of the lecture, an elderly white gentleman stood up and said how come i never heard the stories? i was growing up in the '60s, '70s and '80s and no one was talking about it. the party on the stage never even got to respond because before they could begin to answer the question an elderly african-american gentleman stood up and said i was living this entire story my entire life and i got reminders on an annual basis. so one of the things i learned from that experience is that sometimes when it seems like till's story has gone underground, like for those 49 years and 11 months when the state spent zero dollars. that doesn't mean no one is talking about it. it just means that they're not talking about it in public. one of the reasons people don't talk about the till story because scandalous, it was considered subversive literature to the extent that, you know what, you know how people in mississippi delta learned of the till story. the news traveled north to chicago. when it got to chicago, it hit the media juggernaut publications and the black newspaper from chicago was then smuggled on the illinois central railroad back into mississippi so that people ten miles from where the murder site happened could read about the murder and hear about it for the first time by the papers smuggled in from chicago. one thing i learned from that anecdote was that this was a subversive story. if you were to go up and ask one of these people do you know the story of emmett till, even if they did, they would say no. you had to smuggle this stuff in. it was stuff you guarded. i mean, think if you read the biography of the activist ann moody. she talks about learning the story of emmett till, but never talking about it publicly. right. all this stuff begins to complicate what happened in those decades. i know that's a long winded answer, joseph. thank you. >> question over here. >> you've been in a relationship with emmett till now for more than a decade. how has emmett changed you? >> that's a hard question. it's actually a common question, too. the easy way to say is i did not take up till's story because i was an advocate for racial justice. i became an advocate for racial justice because i took up till's story. i often tell people, in fact, i might have even told you guys tonight when i started making this app, i thought it was going to be a part-time job. i was going to write a book on architecture, truth to be told. it never happened. but it became a vocation and occasionally i describe it as a calling, right. this story really captured my life. and one of the reasons i include that photograph of my daughter and i in the smithsonian is to give people a sense that it's not, it is a job and i'm not unaware of the fact that i get paid for my job of being a professor, right. but it has become more of a job. it sort of seeped into not just my life but my family's life, right. i wish honestly both my kids could be here but ashline in particular loves these stories. weekends on c-span2 intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story. and on sundays, booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding from c-span2 comes from these television companies and more including comcast. >> you think this is just a community center? no, it's way more than that. comcast is partnering with 1,000 community centers so students from low-income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. >> comcast along with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service. >> now available in the c-span shop c-span 2022 congressional directory. go there today to order a copy of the congressional directory. this compact spiral bound book is your guide to the federal government with contact information for every member of congress, including bios and committee assignments and contact information for state governors and the biden administration cabinet. order your copy today at c-spanshop.org or scan the qr code with ur

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