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.
