The hopeful part

Reading "The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and the Path to a Shared American Future" by Robert P. Jones, Simon & Schuster, 2023 and RCL Pr29A.

I got to the hopeful part.

Robert Jones’ first account of a community attempting to deal with its white supremacist past is set in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. That’s where the fourteen year old Emmett Till was visiting relatives in 1955 when he was abducted in the middle of the night and lynched. Two local white men were tried for his murder but an all-white jury acquitted them. A year later, the two men sold their story to Look Magazine for the 2022 equivalent of $43,000.¹ In the interview, they admitted to torturing and killing Emmett.  Double-jeopardy prevented them from being re-tried.

Fifty years later, neither whites nor blacks in Tallahatchie County knew about Emmett Till or the trial. No one had talked about it all for years. One man -- Jerome G. Little -- grew up in the county where it happened. He only learned about it while he was in Europe serving as a Marine. He came home feeling “something was just in me to make sure that everybody in this county… everybody in this nation understands what happened and why.”²

Little was elected to the Tallahatchie County Board of Supervisors and became its first black President of the Board in 2005. The next year he began forming the Emmett Till Memorial Commission. The black and white members of the ETMC have now been working together for nearly twenty years. Together they built the Emmett Till Interpretive Center which “exists to tell the story of the Emmett Till tragedy and to point a way towards racial healing.”

This week, I have learned at least two things.

First, the truth needs to be told. Names need to be remembered. If we don’t continue to “say their names,” their stories will be forgotten. Emmett Till’s nearly was.  

I have a new appreciation for organizations which commit to tell the truth, and “say their names,” like the church I attend which says this in its weekly bulletin: “[We] acknowledge that we gather on the unceded and ancestral land of the Abenaki, Pennacook and Wabanaki Peoples…”

Second, the route to racial reconciliation will probably not run in a straight line from any one person’s inspiration to its realization. Racial reconciliation is not one person’s work. Individual initiative is necessary, but then it takes a village and living in a village means making room for different perspectives, strengths, limitations and visions.  

What if we are just an individual. What if we haven’t found a village yet. What do we do?  The advice I hear in this Sunday’s gospel is, “the next right thing.”  Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the stranger, care for the sick, visit the prisoner. 

While we’re we doing those “next right things,” we can also imagine a better, closer-to-redeemed world.  As the members of Tallahatchie’s ETMC said, (and I love this): “Imagination lets us smell the flowers in the seeds we plant.”³

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Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

1. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till

2. The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, Robert P. Jones (Simon & Schuster, 2023) at 88.

3. The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, at 101.