Right, so I have a few other things that I’m thinking about today, but this is going to be the first thing I address:

I’ve known about Emmett Till and details about what happened to him for a long time. I’m not quite sure HOW long, but it’s been awhile, and I don’t remember when I first learned about it. I do remember reading a picture-poetry book about it called A Wreath for Emmett Till my freshman year of high school and being almost moved to tears because it was so beautiful and just so. sad. We’re moving into the Civil Rights phase of my African American history class, (and I feel like I become more affected by learning about this every single time I learn it) and today we watched part of a documentary called “Eye on the Prize”. The first part, to be more precise, which opens with the Emmett Till murder and how that event helped mobilize the black community. 

This film showed footage of Emmett Till’s funeral. I wasn’t really prepared for that. It showed video of people walking past Emmett Till’s open casket (“so the world would see what they did to him,” said is mother) and being absolutely horrified. and then the film showed a shot of his casket, of his picture hanging above it and of Emmett’s face. It was the first time I had ever seen Emmett post-lynching. I cried a little, in the way that I didn’t really feel it coming on but all of the sudden there were tears falling. It was horrific, truly horrific, that that happened only 57 years ago in this country. 

I’m trying to process how to carry around that sight, and those things that happened without hatred or the type of anger that lashes out and that makes me ineffective. I’m trying to figure out a balance of looking at so much of the world’s ugliness (which I have 12 credit hours in a week this semester!) with looking at all of the love and promise that my life holds and at how good God is. and also how much this makes God hurt, too, and to know that He suffered with Emmett’s family, and so much more, because He’s God. And also I want to talk about this, and work it out with people and I want people to think about this, these things too often disappear into a “oh that happened in the past, we need to move on and concentrate on what has been done since” and yes, that is important, too, but please, this happened and was so sad and was not at all an okay thing and cannot be made okay because it cannot be undone. Yes, progress obviously has been made and progress is still being made, but I guess for me it’s more of a tribute, an acknowledgement of that being not okay and an acknowledgement of how wrong it was. 

Obviously there are a lot of things in the world that are suffering and brokenness and sadness, on all different levels, and sometimes I let them affect me way more than I should, but i do believe that these are important things to feel sometimes.