Race, Gender, and Social Justice 2018

'Action Civics' Enlists Students in Hands-On Democracy

The 8th graders in a civics class in Oklahoma may be too young to vote, but they’ve learned how to bring about change in their government anyway. …

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/27/education/school-districts-funding-white-minorities.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur

Chloe Lowell

Mar 1, 2019

Emmett Till’s Murder, and How America Remembers Its Darkest Moments
By AUDRA D. S. BURCH, VEDA SHASTRI and TIM CHAFFEE
FEB. 20, 2019
He walked into a store and it changed civil rights. That crumbling store has come to symbolize the struggle to address the nation’s racial violence.

MONEY, Miss. — Along the edge of Money Road, across from the railroad tracks, an old grocery store rots.

In August 1955, a 14-year-old black boy visiting from Chicago walked in to buy candy. After being accused of whistling at the white woman behind the counter, he was later kidnapped, tortured, lynched and dumped in the Tallahatchie River.

The murder of Emmett Till is remembered as one of the most hideous hate crimes of the 20th century, a brutal episode in American history that helped kindle the civil rights movement. And the place where it all began, Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, is still standing. Barely.

Today, the store is crumbling, roofless and covered in vines. On several occasions, preservationists, politicians and business leaders — even the State of Mississippi — have tried to save its remaining four walls. But no consensus has been reached.

Some residents in the area have looked on the store as a stain on the community that should be razed and forgotten. Others have said it should be restored as a tribute to Emmett and a reminder of the hate that took his life.

As the debate has played out over the decades, the store has continued to deteriorate and collapse, even amid frequent cultural and racial reckonings across the nation on the fate of Confederate monuments. At stake in Money and other communities across the country is the question of how Americans choose to acknowledge the country’s past.

“It’s part of this bigger story, part of a history that we can learn from,” said the Rev. Wheeler Parker, 79, a pastor in suburban Chicago and a cousin of Emmett’s who went with him to Bryant’s Grocery that day. “The store should be one of the places we share Emmett’s story.”

(The Justice Department quietly reopened the Emmett Till case last year after Carolyn Bryant Donham, the white shopkeeper, recanted parts of her story.)

In and around the Delta, the memory of Emmett’s murder lingers.

The cotton gin from which the 75-pound fan that was tethered to his neck with barbed wire was stolen is now a small museum. There are informal tours of the abandoned bridge where his body was likely tossed into the river. The barn where he was brutally beaten is unmarked, but its owner allows the occasional visitor.

Emmett Till with his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, circa 1950. Everett Collection, via Alamy
And, on a larger stage, his story is the subject of upcoming feature films and books.

But not everybody sees the memorials the same way. Several historical markers put up to commemorate Emmett have repeatedly been vandalized, shot down and replaced.

To nurture racial reconciliation in the area, the Emmett Till Memorial Commission was founded in 2006. It restored the courtroom in Sumner where Emmett’s killers — Roy Bryant, the owner of the store in the 1950s, and his half brother, J.W. Milam — were acquitted. Outside, a marker commemorating Emmett stands steps from a monument honoring Confederate soldiers.

Ray Tribble, who sat on the jury of all-white men who acquitted Mr. Bryant and Mr. Milam, purchased the building that was once Bryant’s Grocery in the 1980s. He died in 1998. The store has been in the Tribble family ever since.

The family has all but refused to restore or sell the property. And it continues to wither away. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/20/us/emmett-till-murder-legacy.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage