If you don't know the tragic story of Emmett Till, you can click here to read something I posted about him a few years back. It is the kind of history that Ron DeSantis doesn't want Florida students to know about, as I noted in a recent post.
Fortunately, Joe Biden's administration is making it harder to forget the ugliness of American racism.
President Biden on Tuesday will establish a national monument honoring Emmett Till, the Black teenager who was abducted and killed by white supremacists in 1955, and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, who helped galvanize the civil rights movement by bravely displaying her child’s brutalized body for the world to see.
The Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument will span three protected sites in Illinois, where Emmett was born 82 years ago, and in Mississippi, where he was killed at the age of 14 after being accused of whistling at a white woman.
The monument stands as a sharp rebuke to those who would have Americans forget or ignore their innate racism.
Since Mr. Biden took office, more than 40 states have introduced or passed laws or taken other measures to restrict how issues of race and racism are taught, according to Education Week.
Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, referenced Florida’s new standards on Monday, saying the Till monument was arriving “at an important moment.”
“Let’s not forget what we’ve seen these past several months, as we’ve witnessed extreme officials in Florida and across the country lie about American history — the most recent example shamefully, shamefully promoting a lie that enslaved people actually benefited from slavery,” she said. “It’s inaccurate, insulting. It’s hurtful and prevents an honest account of our nation’s history.”
This isn't the first time the White House has invoked the memory of Till's horrific murder.
During a White House screening of the movie “Till” in February, Mr. Biden told the crowd that he chose the movie because “history matters.”
“To remember history is to shine a light on the good, the bad, the truth and who we are as a nation,” he said at the screening. “And our history shows that while darkness and denialism hide very much, they erase nothing. They can’t erase the past, and they shouldn’t.”
He also said that signing the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, which made lynching a federal hate crime, in March 2022, was “one of the great honors of my career.”
Despite what some would have people believe, history matters, and it renders judgements. To revise and pervert that history, as so many in the U.S. seem intent on doing, is yet another stark illustration of the ongoing systemic racism that continues to cripple and diminish that nation in the eyes of the world.
If you would like to know more about the monument and Emmett Till's fate, go to the 17:50 minute mark of the following:
Sometimes I feel like an old man slogging through the flooding quagmire to ‘the dike’ to stick my thumb in one of the leaks Lorne
ReplyDeleteI must leave ‘home’ to do so.. it’s nice at home & so far the dike is holding .. though leaking randomly.. everywhere.
There are others.. like me, though already at the dike..
What’s truly bizarre is I can easily see a number of other persons with sharp poles.. creating new holes in the dike !
Even crazier.. is I Know.. and we Know.. who those people are !
Even more insane is that we actually allow them to do so !
The ‘topper’ has to be.. the absolute worst of them..
is an Elected Public Servant from Carleton Federal Riding..
🦎🏴☠️
I feel exactly the same, Sal. The problems, both domestic and international, seem ultimately unsolvable, given that the worst of human nature is often on full and vigourous display.
Deletegiven that the worst of human nature is often on full and rigorous display.
ReplyDeleteWe are experiencing willful ignorance.
That modern generations , those born to the selfish baby boomers have taken selfishness to new heights.
The Boomers were/are ignorant.
Their better informed offspring willfully ignorant!
TB
It is hard to feel hopeful when education has become politicized to the degree it has been in Florida and other states, TB. When the people in charge choose to keep people in darkness, what is there to be done, other than to try to educate in other ways?
DeleteDo you not feel that , in Canada, we have a dumbing down of education through some , not all, radical teachers unions?
ReplyDeleteWhen I was involved with my daughters schooling an made many visits to her school, I found a definite bridge between the teachers that wished to teach and the teachers that wee beholding to their union!
I can't say that was ever my experience, Anon. I have been retired for quite awhile, but the teachers I was wary of, and they were a definite minority, were those who saw the classroom as only a way station on the way to administrative jobs. They wanted to be seen as "team players" which in practical terms meant they would go with the teaching flavour of the month, whether it had any pedagogical merit or not. They were ladder-climbers first, and teachers second.
Delete