Whitewashing American History

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

This past Sunday would have been Emmett Till's 80th birthday - had he not been beaten, shot, killed, and thrown into a river by angry white men in rural Mississippi when he was only fourteen.  Till was killed because he supposedly was too familiar with a white woman who was running a grocery store.  More than sixty years later the white woman admitted that she had lied both to her husband and to the court regarding Till's alleged advances toward her.

Till, a Chicago youth, had been visiting his country cousins in Mississippi and had just been in the state three days when he had wandered into the small rural grocery store to buy a soda.

Emmett Till's body was so badly mangled by the beating that Mississippi authorities tried to get him buried quickly in that state so the public would not know how gruesome the crime against him had been, but Emmett's mother, herself a native of the Delta region of Mississippi where the crime occurred, insisted that her son be returned home to Chicago for burial.  

A local undertaker tried to conceal much of the injury and brutality that had befallen the boy, and his mother was encouraged to leave the casket closed. But Miss Mamie, Till's mother, insisted on seeing her son to say goodbye. When she saw how savagely he had been beaten, Miss Mamie determined to have his casket open for the funeral so that the whole world could gaze in horror at what a group of backwater racists had done to her son.  More than 50,000 people marched by the open casket and viewed young Emmett, and Jet Magazine ran photos of his brutalized corpse.

Many regard the Emmett Till case as the beginning of the modern civil rights movement.

Significantly, I went to high school in the 1960's and never heard of Emmett Till in any of my classes.

Significantly, I went to college in the 1960's and was a history major with an emphasis in American history, and also never heard Emmett Till's name mentioned there.

Both of those educational experiences were in rural Missouri, "outstate" of the urban centers of Kansas City and St. Louis.

School curriculum, it seems, determines how much of our history gets passed on, at least in the classroom, and school curriculum is set by groups of concerned citizens, like school boards and state legislatures, who may not want students being made aware of certain aspects of their community's or their nation's history.

The murder of Emmett Till was a significant event in American history because it was one of the things that helped to foment the civil rights movement of the 1960's.  The Tulsa race massacre of 1921 was significant because it showed the absolute destructive power that white rage can inflict on black success and achievement.  I never learned about the Tulsa race massacre or the burning of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street" in school either.

More than a century of lynchings and mob "justice" helped to shape our national character.  The unfettered racism of American banks as they directed business opportunities and housing loans into specific areas based on race, and denied those same economic advances to other areas, again based on race, have also played a significant role in our nation's history and development.

"Blockbusting," "sit-in's," "freedom rides," "Brown v Board of Education," "segregation," "integration," and "miscegenation" were all part of the long and complicated story of race in the United States, along with so very much more.

Those are elements of our history that helped to shape and define the United States as it exists today, and yet so many in this country want to hide America's long and complicated history with race and racism and ignore the economic and social inequalities that have resulted from that racism - and pretend that everything is fine with the world and anyone who works hard will get ahead and succeed in life.

Ignoring the past does not change the past, nor does it benefit the present.   We must know where we came from if we are to understand the present and aim for a better future.  Without the benefit of hindsight we will continue to stumble along in the clutches of hatred and ignorance of a bygone era.

The whitewashing of American history by distorting or hiding the role that racism played in the development of our country is unfair to students of all colors.   History tells us where we came from, and it helps us to understand who we are, and if history has been "adjusted" so as to not offend someone's sensibilities or to fit a certain political narrative, it paints a false picture and provides a shaky platform on which to build the future.

Tulsa happened.  Emmett Till happened.  Rosa Parks happened.  George Floyd happened.  Whitewashing history is lying about our past, and in the end it benefits no one and makes us weaker as a people - and as a nation.