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“IF EMMETT TILL LIVED”: CULTURAL HISTORIAN SARAH LEWIS ON NEW
BOOK/EXHIBIT, VISIT TO MISSISSIPPI  
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Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis
August 4, 2026
Democracy Now! [[link removed]]

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_ More than 70 years after the kidnapping, torture and lynching of
14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, a major new photography
exhibit and companion book ask how the world would be different “If
Emmett Till Lived.” _

, Democracy Now!

 

 

More than 70 years after the kidnapping, torture and lynching of
14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, a major new photography
exhibit and companion book ask how the world would be different “If
Emmett Till Lived.” The Black teenager’s brutal murder, as well as
his open-casket funeral that displayed his mutilated body, shocked the
United States in 1955 and became a galvanizing moment in the civil
rights movement. If Till had lived, he would be just over 85 years old
today.

“Art really is one of the critical modes of creating an appeal to
the moral imagination,” says historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, the
curator behind “If Emmett Till Lived” and editor of the book.

Lewis collaborated on the project with Till’s surviving cousin,
Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to see Till
alive. The exhibit opens at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at
Columbia College Chicago on September 10.

TRANSCRIPT

_This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form._

AMY GOODMAN: This is _Democracy Now!_, democracynow.org. I’m Amy
Goodman in New York, with Juan González in Chicago.

What if Emmitt Till had lived? What if he had safely boarded the train
back home to Chicago? More than 70 years after the kidnapping, torture
and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, a major new
photography exhibit and companion book asks those questions by
imagining not only the life young Emmett lost, but the decades he was
denied. This is the exhibit’s curator, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS: What if Emmett Till lived? What if he had
returned home still a child, alive and free? What would that life have
required of us all? These questions invite a reckoning with the past
and a probing investigation of the current state of American life.

This exhibition, this publication and the invitation together offer a
collective arena to consider how freedom has been secured on American
ground. It is a creative monument to Emmett Till’s unlived life. It
lets us picture what could have come, what should have come. It lets
us imagine it, what it wrought, and what it signals about the work
that remains.

AMY GOODMAN: If Emmett Till had lived, he would have turned 85 years
old on July 25th, the day the Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has
declared Emmett Till Day. But Till was murdered at the age of 14 on
August 28th, 1955, dragged from his great-uncle’s home in Money,
Mississippi, by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white
woman. They beat, tortured and shot Till, tied a heavy cotton gin fan
to him with barbed wire, threw his body into the Tallahatchie River.
His body was discovered several days later.

Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till’s mother, had his body returned to
Chicago for burial. She insisted on an open casket so the world could
see the brutality of bigotry and racism. _Jet_ magazine and other
publications carried photos of Emmett Till’s beaten, distended face
in his coffin, shocking the world and galvanizing the civil rights
movement.

Speaking to _Democracy Now!_ in 2000, Mamie Till-Mobley reflected
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on the painful moment she learned about her son’s murder.

MAMIE TILL-MOBLEY: When we knew that Emmett was dead, our first action
— we couldn’t take time to cry. As I announced to the family what
was happening, of course there were screams. People were hitting the
floor, and the hysteria was setting in. And I remember standing,
announcing that “We don’t have time to cry now, we’ve got to do
something. I don’t know what to do, and you’ve got to help me come
to make some decisions.”

AMY GOODMAN: The voice of Mamie Till-Mobley on _Democracy Now!_ a
quarter of a century ago. To see the whole interview
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you can go to democracynow.org.

The new exhibit, “If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American
Ground,” opens September 10th at the Museum of Contemporary
Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Drawing from the museum’s
permanent collection, it invites visitors to imagine the decades
Emmett Till never lived, the neighborhoods he might have walked, the
civil rights struggles he might have witnessed, the family he might
have built, the ordinary moments of joy he never had the chance to
experience.

It comes as the Trump administration has escalated attacks on DEI
— diversity, equity and inclusion — moved to censor how U.S.
history is taught and presented, and targeted museums and cultural
institutions over installations and programs reckoning with racism and
the nation’s past.

For more, we’re joined by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, cultural historian
who collaborated with Emmett Till’s cousin, Reverend Wheeler Parker
Jr., the last living witness to see Emmett, to curate the exhibition
and the accompanying standalone publication, the book _If Emmett Till
Lived: A Creative Monument_. Professor Lewis is founder of the Vision
& Justice Initiative and currently the John L. Loeb associate
professor of humanities and associate professor of African American
studies at Harvard University.

Welcome to _Democracy Now!_ It’s great to have you with us.

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS: It’s an honor to be with you. Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: What a journey you have been on and you’re taking us
all on. You have just returned from being with Emmett’s cousin, the
last — one of the last people, except for his murderers, to see him
alive. You went to Mississippi. You came back to Chicago. Can you talk
about this journey and what inspired this remarkable book that’s
going to come out soon, _If Emmett Till Lived_?

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS: Yes. Again, it’s an honor to be with you and
to know that Mamie Till-Mobley also spoke with you, who inspired this
entire journey for me.

Have we made good on the sacrifice of Emmett Till’s life? This is
the question I asked myself when I went to Mississippi and saw for
myself the evidence of the resistance to honoring his life, even 70
years later — the bullet shot marker at the Tallahatchie River
site, Graball Landing, for example, being one. And I asked myself:
What more could I do? We all have a role to play, and asked myself if
we have found — if we need new ways to see anew, to see his life
anew.

This exhibition was inspired by Mamie Till-Mobley’s prophetic act.
She challenged us to understand the power of witnessing in American
democracy. She said, as you know, “Let the world see what they’ve
done to my son.” In that moment, she was living out an idea that so
many before her understood — Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois
— that we would need the power of the image to understand the
unspeakable in American democracy.

But the question I asked myself is: What’s required today? Have we
seen so many images of injustice that we might be numb to it? And so,
through the extraordinary collection at the Museum of Contemporary
Photography, found an arena, a way to invite people in to understand
his humanity, all of our humanity, and resulted in this exhibition
that opens in September. It’s culled from the collection
approximately 70 photographers deliberately to rhyme with the nearly
70 years that have passed, and really is joining so many others in
this moment, from the National Trust, that is doing extraordinary work
to renovate Roberts Temple, to the state of Illinois, where Governor
Pritzker announced that we would have an Emmett Till Day, to really
ask this question: If Emmett Till lived, what would that life have
looked like for us all? Right? And so, it brings everyone in to this
conversation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sarah Lewis, I wanted to ask you — you
mentioned the bulletproof marker at Graball Landing in Mississippi.
I’m not sure that most of our audience is aware of its history.
Could you talk about that and the resistance to it?

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS: Yes. Thank you. The Emmett Till Interpretive
Center began to honor the site where his body is thought to have been
brought out of the Tallahatchie River, in 2008. That first marker was
shot, defaced with acid and thrown into the Tallahatchie River shortly
after it was erected, 35 days, I believe, after it was erected. The
second marker was shot 317 times. And the third marker had the same
fate. One of the markers is in the Smithsonian today. The fourth
marker, which was erected recently, is deliberately bulletproof,
weighs 500 pounds and is fronted with abrasion-resistant acrylic to
protect it from these acts of violence.

When I saw the reporting on this in 2019, it was because a group of
students at University of Mississippi had proudly displayed themselves
having shot the marker on their social media page, and I was stunned.
I needed to see for myself the site, the context, to understand the
act itself. Was it a highway shooting? How premeditated was this? And
saw that that road to Graball Landing makes you pay for every inch.
You have to know where you’re going. The gravel on the ground forced
my car to slow down to such a speed that you would have to be
conscious of where you were. This is a sacred site.

What does it mean that, over 70 years later, we still cannot let his
body rest? The bullet shots on each marker, to me, indicate a symbol
of why bravery is required in American democracy today. The acts of
resistance give you a sense of the urgency to understand the
significance of Governor Pritzker’s act, of the Roberts Temple
renovation, of the decision and the announcement by President Joe
Biden in 2023 that there would be a tri-site monument to Mamie
Till-Mobley and Emmett Till. Unless you understand the resistance, the
bulletproof marker being, I think, the most vivid one, you don’t
understand the significance of these acts, of these monuments, of
these markers. So, that’s a —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m wondering — I’m wondering if you could
put this in context to today. Last year, CBS ran a piece
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titled “National monument honoring Emmett Till at risk of removal
due to Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives, budget cuts.” Your response?

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS: Well, I don’t believe that that — that the
Smithsonian ever removed anything, from what I understand. But what it
does indicate, what this cultural moment indicates, is the
significance of markers and monuments for American democracy. One of
the hidden forces in American democracy is the power of culture,
right? This is — we’re really today asking ourselves: What does
truth and reconciliation require? It requires witnessing. Again, this
is what Mamie Till-Mobley was so prophetic in understanding. It
requires that we actually see our history. And if we ignore the role
that museums play, that displays play, that markers and symbols and
monuments play, we’re missing how we’ve actually constructed and
assembled our democracy.

We also are in need of a new assembly today in American democracy. And
that’s being constituted by lawyers like Bryan Stevenson and
Sherrilyn Ifill, who understand the importance of culture for justice
today, Bryan Stevenson creating the legacy sites in Montgomery to
honor the over 4,000 lynched men, women and children, whose lives have
not been acknowledged or honored, and dedicated his nonexistent free
time to creating a memorial complex. Sherilyn Ifill with her new 14th
Amendment Center is seeing culture as a pillar for democracy. Why?
Because art really is one of the critical modes of creating an appeal
to the moral imagination. What do you do in the face of unjust law?
You have to appeal to the conscience. And the power of the artist is
to do precisely that. We see this with Gordon Parks. You see this with
Lewis Hine, whose work transformed labor movements. You see this with
so many of the artists who are also in the exhibition itself.

AMY GOODMAN: And I want to talk about that exhibition and the book.
You have Lonnie Bunch — _What If Emmet Till Lived?_ — quoting
from Mamie Till-Mobley, after a moving, hourslong conversation with
her. He said, “She had carried the burden of Emmett’s memory for
nearly 50 years, and it was time historians like myself share that
burden. She ended our conversation by saying that to her, Emmett was
crucified on the cross of racial hatred and injustice.” Lonnie
Bunch, head now of the Smithsonian, under so much enormous pressure. I
want to go to the cover of this book, this astounding cover, _If
Emmett Till Lived_. Tell us about the photograph and, overall, the
photographs you chose.

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS: Thank you. Well, this, I’m not afraid to say,
was inspired by what I can only describe as divination. I went through
18,000 photographs in the museum’s collection and asked myself: What
would Emmett Till want for the unfurling of his life? And then asked a
set of individuals, including Lonnie Bunch, Ava DuVernay, many others,
Alicia Garza — founded the Black Lives Matter movement — to
select images, as well, to walk alongside Reverend Wheeler Parker and
Mamie Till-Mobley.

But this photograph by Stephen Marc that’s on the cover, taken in
1988, struck me as an emblem for the entire project. It is not
constructed. It is a real-life event that he witnessed on a beach in
Chicago, a father tossing his young boy up in the air. And he saw it,
and he asked — he had one frame left in his camera, film, of course
— if he could do it again. And he did, and he captured the exact
moment he wanted.

I asked myself as I looked at it: Which one is Emmett Till? It could
be, of course, the young boy, suspended, secure, almost impossibly
confident in that state of this ascent. But it should also be able to
be the father. We should also be able to see Emmett Till as that
father. And it prompted me to think of the life denied. That tilted
horizon line, I think, speaks to the work we need to do to write our
foundation and secure American ground so that all are secure on it.
Stephen Marc, this extraordinary photographer, is one of many in the
show. He happens to be a relative of Dr. Carla Hayden, the librarian
of Congress. But this photograph becomes an emblem for the central
question, “What if Emmett Till lived?” and speaks to, I think, the
work we need to tilt that horizon line, to straighten our ground.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ll be — you were, on Friday, with Reverend
Wheeler Parker Jr. Emmett’s cousin, next-door neighbor, went with
him to Money, Mississippi, was with him the night the white men, the
mob, came and ultimately lynched him, and he ended up in the bottom of
the Tallahatchie River. You were at Mamie Till-Mobley and Emmett
Till’s grave. Describe that journey.

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS: If every American took the journey that Emmett
Till walked to go to Mississippi, and that his body went through to
meet his end, we would have the truth and reconciliation we need in
this democracy. It has been a profound time. What an honor to be able
to co-curate the show with Reverend Wheeler Parker, who has such an
extraordinarily open heart, has seen the worst, has forgiven all. It
has been really unspeakable.

We recently went to Mississippi on what is his final journey to the
ground where Emmett Till was last free and then died. We went to every
site pertaining to that, his time there. Thankfully, we did photograph
and film it, because it’s impossible to describe, so hopefully
you’ll be able to see here, for example, an image of us at the barn,
the site that is now in the hands of the Emmett Till Interpretive
Center. It was the first time that he met the owner of the barn, who
held it for over 30 years, and the first time that they met. And you
can see in my face the tension and the nervousness about that meeting.
It is the equivalent, this barn, of if — if you were to make an
analogy to the Holocaust, the oven, in effect. This is our symbol,
right? And there, Emmett Till was tortured and lynched. Willie Reed
heard those sounds.

What was it like for Reverend Parker? I have to wonder. He described
it to me, but we’ll never fully know. He thought of what his best
friend was going through, but he also describes this fundamental fact
that Emmett Till did not end in the casket. His life lived on with all
that came in its wake. So, he has an understanding of the sort of
redemption that did transpire for the country. But it was painful to
watch him there.

It was inspiring to see, in Chicago and in Mississippi, too, how his
testimony inspires. You know, when you’re in his presence and you
hear him think through the journey of the 70 years that have happened
since, when you hear him describe that he was sent out on “the first
thing smoking,” as he says, back to Chicago after Emmett Till was
kidnapped, you realize that Emmett Till, you know, is so many of us.
Emmett Till could have been Reverend Parker. He knows that. He lives
with that survivor’s guilt, as he describes it, and has turned the
intensity of that, that heat, into light to illuminate what we need to
understand about ourselves in this democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: _If Emmett Till Lived_ is the new book and the photo
exhibition at Columbia College that opens on September 10th. And that
date that he died, August 28th, also the date, most people don’t
realize, that Dr. Martin Luther King held that rally on the Mall, “I
Have a Dream,” August 28th, 1963. It was eight years later. Mamie
Till-Mobley saying she wanted that casket open for the wake and the
funeral, for the world to see the ravages of racism, the brutality of
bigotry. Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, thank you so much for being with us,
cultural historian who collaborated with Emmett’s cousin, Reverend
Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to see Emmett. They’ve
curated the forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary
Photography at Columbia College Chicago, opening September 10th, the
exhibit titled and the new book titled _If Emmett Till Lived_. We will
cover all that transpires. Coming up — and I look forward to being
with you, Professor Lewis, on August 11th in Edinburgh
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along with Bryan Stevenson and Ken Burns and Nicky Benedetti and
Wynton Marsalis, for an amazing event talking about all these issues
and more.

_PROFESSOR SARAH ELIZAABETH LEWIS is founder of the Vision & Justice
Initiative and currently the John L. Loeb associate professor of
humanities and associate professor of African American studies at
Harvard University._
 
_AMY GOODMAN is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a
national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on
over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide._
 
_JUAN GONZÁLEZ (co-host) has been a professional journalist for more
than 40 years and was a staff columnist at the New York Daily News
from 1987 to 2016. He is a two-time recipient of the George Polk Award
for commentary (1998 and 2010) and was inducted into the Deadline
Club’s New York Journalism Hall of Fame in 2015. A professor of
Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University from 2017 to 2023,
he is currently a Senior Fellow at the Great Cities Institute of the
University of Illinois-Chicago._
 
_DEMOCRACY NOW! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted
by award-winning journalists Amy Goodman and Juan González. Our
reporting includes breaking daily news headlines and in-depth
interviews with people on the front lines of the world’s most
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voices speaking for themselves, providing a unique and sometimes
provocative perspective on global events._
 
_DEMOCRACY NOW! is a 501(c)3 non-profit news organization. We do not
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We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our
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* Emmett Till
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* U.S. history
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* Book Review
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* exhibition
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* chicago
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* Mississippi
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* Mamie Till-Mobley
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* democracy
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* Culture
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