Have Mercy.
The first time I saw a photograph of the mangled corpse of Emmett Louis Till, the air left the room. The boy was only 14 years old. Have Mercy. I have never seen a photograph that screamed at me. I can’t look at it, to this day, because it screams at me. First I hear his screams. Then, I hear his mother’s. Mamie Till Mobley said that when she went to the morgue to identify his body, she kept thinking, as she discovered a hole here and a smashed bone there, was, “Was it really necessary? Did they have to do all of that? He was already dead.”

She could have kept the casket closed.
But she didn’t. She threw open the lid so that the world could see what they had done to her boy. The horror gave birth to a movement.
Rosa Parks has often said that she was mobilized by that boy who was beaten to death, castrated, shot in the head, tied to a cotton gin with barbed wire and tossed into a river outside of Money Mississippi. Fifty years ago this past Summer. She was tired, but not from that seamstress job in Alabama. If you’re a black woman who grew up in the South, you know what she was tired of.

Other people refused to give up their seats too, but Rosa became a symbol. By breaking the law, she took her life into her own hands. It was nothing for a black woman or a black man to become some of that strange fruit hanging on trees south of the Mason-Dixon. Blood on the trees. Blood on the roots. And printed up on postcards like trophies next to smiling parents and kids.

So Ms. Rosa headed north. And the boycotts shut down public transportation in Alabama for over a year before that hellish and ignorant Jim Crow had to loosen his grip. on the buses. and most everything else eventually.

Of course we did not all live happily ever after, but Rosa Parks gave a lot of people the strength to stand up and risk everything to address a wrong that was centuries in the making. She helped African Americans, which helped all Americans, because we all know that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. What a legacy.

Maybe someday, that photograph will stop screaming at me.