Emmett Till, Justice, and the Task of Recognition

The murder of the African American teenager Emmett Till in 1955 and the acquittal of his confessed murderers constitute watershed events in the American Civil Rights movement whose legacy continues into the present. Many people can vividly recall their first viewing of Emmett Till's postmortem picture, which shows a bloated and disfigured body lying in an open casket or on the coroner's slab, and cite it as a consciousness-altering moment in their lives. The power of those images and the story leading up to them continues into the present. In a 2004 press release in which the Department of Justice announced the reopening of the nearly 20-year-old case, Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, R. Alexander Acosta, is quoted as having stated, "The Emmett Till case stands at the heart of the American civil rights movement ... This brutal murder and grotesque miscarriage of justice outraged a nation and helped galvanize support for the modern American civil rights movement. We owe it to Emmett Till, and we owe it to ourselves, to see whether after all these years, some additional measure of justice remains possible" (USDOJ). The remarkable feature of the Emmett Till case-sadly not the only incident of a racially motivated murder in the Jim Crow South-is its visibility. Indeed, the visual accessibility of the multiple stages in this case-from the body's discovery to its burial to its deliberate and disturbing display at the funeral, and extending even to its virtual visibility in a Mississippi courtroom-set this episode in the history of civil rights agitation apart from others. As this article will demonstrate, the exceptional invocation of the power of the visual in this event illustrates a key concept in play on both sides of the civil rights argument-namely, how the mechanics of visual recognition are central to a concept of humanity. This article examines three major sites wherein Emmett Till's body was figured as a spectacle-the funeral home/morgue, the funeral, and the trial. Taking into account how each of these venues might position the spectator in a specific way, the article analyzes how issues of distortion and misrecognition are negotiated in relation to an overarching notion of humanity. As I will demonstrate, these visually oriented events derive their power in part by appealing to the same rhetorical and ideological features of traditional memorial photography, the memento mori's Nevertheless, in the representation of a disfigured body, the spectator's visual encounter is significantly different than that of the memento mori's viewer. In this case the visible dead body not only instructs the spectator on issues of mortality but also illustrates the sometimes frustrating relationship between mortality and justice. Without denying that the images in the Emmett Till case-especially the images of his dead body-are powerful because they are perceived as supplying documentary evidence of a brutal act, this article asserts that the spectacle of Till's body is rooted in a visual aesthetic and ideology other than realism. This nonrealist logic is an essential misrecognition required by the concept of humanity. The spectacles and images of Till's body accomplish their political work by situating an unrecognizable body that is, nevertheless, recognized by the spectator as human into a narrative of human suffering. After assessing the effect produced by visually beholding the human body, this article concludes with the site in which the acts of recognition and narration are made fundamentally political-the courtroom. A series of image-centered events punctuated the Emmett Till lynching, funeral, and trial of 1955. Several elements of the story of Till's murder have been contested, including how many people were involved in the actual abduction and murder (the case has been recently reopened in hopes of resolving these questions); however, the crux of the story is that 14-year-old Emmett Louis Till of Chicago, IL, was visiting his great-uncle Moses Wright, a share cropper, and other relatives in Mississippi on a summer vacation. …