The most renowned facet of Mississippi’s history is our racial divide. This state is more well known for race than it is for our celebrated literature and music and the rest of the cultural arts.
More known for race than NASA’s John C. Stennis Space Center, Ingalls Shipbuilding, the Neshoba County Fair, cotton and soybeans, Camille and Katrina’s devastation, the Nissan and Toyota plants,
two straight NCAA baseball championships, Leontyne Price’s glorious voice, Tammy Wynette’s divorce and Jerry Clower’s funny stories.
Mississippi is more separated on race-related issues than any other place on the planet. Mississippi is home base for race. It just is. Don’t bother arguing. It just is.
We all know it and are preparing to know more about it than some of our 2.9 million people ever wished to know. Some others are jubilant and rightly so. We are all Mississippians, by birth or choice. Once a Mississippian, always a Mississippian. We’re just split on some things.
We’re getting a refurbished and better protected Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley Monument, located at two sites in the Mississippi Delta where Till was savagely murdered on Aug. 28, 1955, and one in Chicago where his mangled body was put on display in an open casket at his mother’s behest.
Mississippi will be split a little further due to all the ceremony honoring Till, a black teenager from Chicago who, while visiting cousins for the summer, was murdered after allegedly whistling at a white clerk in a country store in rural Leflore County.
A 75-pound cotton gin fan was strapped to his body when it was dumped into the Tallahatchie River. Graball Landing, where Till’s body was pulled from the river, is one site for the regenerated monument.
The other location is the Tallahatchie County courthouse in Sumner, where two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, were acquitted at trial for the Till murder.
The state will be further fractured over the monument because many racially apathetic Mississippians are tired of hearing about Till’s death. Earlier monuments placed in the area where the revived one is planned were scarred by vandalism. I say get over it and get right.
The renewed federal project was announced July 25 by President Joe Biden to honor Till. Mr. Biden is right to push this effort to memorialize the death of Till, which provided a major spark for the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
Because of our torrid racial history, it won’t be a popular destination for those Mississippians wanting to forget the Till case.
I hope I’m wrong on that. I hope that, at least, our school children will visit the sites to gain a better — and more truthful — understanding of this state’s racially stained history. They will learn from it.
Gov. Haley Barbour in 2006 directed Mississippi’s public schools to begin correctly teaching this state’s civil rights history.
Perhaps that edict will gain new steam. The story of Emmett Till’s murder should be chapter one.
