Who Is This Emmett Till?

Last Saturday Chicagoan Emmet Till was laid to rest for the second time in 50 years. According to the Chicago Tribune story, in 1955 Till was visiting relatives in the South:

Till, 14, was beaten and shot near Money, Miss., after he allegedly whistled at a white female store clerk.

His body was later found in a river in Mississippi, tied to a cotton-gin fan with a tangle of barbed wire.

After her son’s death, Mamie Till-Mobley insisted that he have an open-casket funeral, wanting the world to see how he had been mutilated in a grisly murder. Thousands of Chicagoans came to pay respects, seeing a face disfigured beyond recognition.

The clerk’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury, but they later admitted their involvement in the murder. Both men have since died.

Till’s body was exhumed last week as the FBI reopened a criminal investigation into the killing.

Aside from the story itself, what I found interesting was the reporting on the radio and in newspapers, in which it was often said that “Emmett Till is being buried today.”

Really? Isn’t that interjecting some sort of religious view into the news? I mean, the “remains” (a word sometimes used) of Till were buried. But Emmett Till, the person? His remains don’t even have the advantage of what some, in the abortion debate, call “potential human life.”

Media scripts do not call embryos persons, and they are alive and growing human beings, so why would they routinely refer to Till’s human “remains,” which are without life and which have no potential for life, as being Emmett Till? Isn’t it just (dead) tissue, which happens to have specific DNA, just like (well, not quite, since it is hardly dead) a “fetus”?

Someone better stop this since it might encourage certain people in their medieval thinking about the sacredness of the human body, at whatever stage of development. Of course I am one of those people.

And so are a lot of people. And even people who might take the side of “pro-choice,” when they look upon the “remains” of their loved ones, might slip from PC a bit and treat the body as if it were so-and-so and bury it with love and honor and respect. And they do this even though, if I may slip a bit back to my earlier pose, the body could just as well be burned, tossed out, harvested, experimented on, used, abused, or whatever.

But those who offer this respect to Emmett Till have it right. It’s what our hearts tell us when our PC brains aren’t looking.

And that comment about there being no “potential” for human life in the grave: I wouldn’t be so sure about that. If we could, we might ask some Roman soldiers stationed at a grave in Palestine about AD 30 about that. There is, I am told, going to more than just a repeat performance. And so may Emmett Till, who suffered in his short life, rise in glory with all the saints.