In Short – Volume 1, Issue 1 (Spring 2024)

May 31, 2024

Portrait of Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley, ca. 1954

Image credit: NAACP Records, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

After [       ] —

By LaTanya McQueen

They’ll say, “but remember Emmett Till’s mother?” always forgetting her name, but not how she had an open casket for her son to show the world saying, let the world see what I’ve seen, a reason thereafter used in response to past and new violences, and each time the echo of their refrain (they need to see, they need to see) fills the air with their inaction.

What they forget is how his sign was stolen, thrown into the river, shot at, replaced again and again, and how white supremacists came in the night to shoot their propaganda, using the grave in their recruitment, and how a group of Old Miss students posed with their rifles, smiling as they stood in front of the bullet-riddled sign and relished in his death, delighting in the horror.

I imagine somewhere, a new radical is watching another video, has his eyes on another image, collecting them like the lynching postcards of old.

“How many will it take for them to see?” others ask, not realizing that they do, just not in the way they mean.

LaTanya McQueen (she/her) is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Arts (2022 Fellowship in Prose) and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She is the author of two books—the essay collection AND IT BEGINS LIKE THIS (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and the novel WHEN THE RECKONING COMES (Harper Perennial, 2021). She is an Assistant Professor of English and teaches in the MFA program at NC State University.