When my parents sent my brother and me off to college in upstate South Carolina back in 2008, they gave us — their black, 18-year-old twin sons — a warning: Be careful around white women.
And why wouldn’t they say this? Their words were meant as a talisman, one that black parents have been passing to their black sons for centuries. It wasn’t long ago, after all, that the racial caste system known as Jim Crow punished, and often killed, black men who dared even to make eye contact with a white woman. Perhaps most notoriously, we saw this violence in the lynching and murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, in 1955.
In his book, The Blood of Emmett Till, historian Timothy B. Tyson returns to this episode, bringing a pivotal moment in American history into a 21st-century understanding. For most of us, Till exists only in death, as the broken body that galvanized a generation of mid-century civil rights activists. Here, though, and with granular detail, Tyson gives a welcome fullness to Till’s truncated life. We learn about the childhood of Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in Webb, Mississippi, a place she described as being less of a town and more a clutter of stores “in search of a town,” and, later, after the Great Migration swept millions of black Americans out of the South, about what it meant to grow up black in Chicago in the 1940s and ’50s.
[For more of this story, written by Brandon Tensley, go to https://psmag.com/america-is-s...067f01e06#.jxq1zkrc3]
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