If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground

“In a more just world, Emmett Till would have returned to Chicago and been allowed the uneventful privilege of growing older,” said Skylar Mitchell in Essence. Instead, the 14-year-old’s life was violently cut short in 1955, when he tried to buy bubblegum while visiting Mississippi relatives and a white woman accused him of disrespecting her. A “remarkable” photo exhibition in the city of his birth is now asking us to imagine what Till’s life might have looked like. Composed of 160 photographs taken across the past seven decades by 118 photographers, the show suggests the jobs, romances, family life, and lazy afternoons that could have been his. Seventy-one years ago, a published photo of a brutalized Till lying in an open casket “exposed the terrible consequences of racial hierarchy” and galvanized the civil rights movement, but this show “asks more of the eye.” It urges us, by way of powerful images created by Gordon Parks, Carrie Mae Weems, Dawoud Bey, Robert Mapplethorpe, and others, to see Black life as it is, stirring us to cherish and protect it.

“Emmett would’ve been 85 this year, had he lived,” said Anya Sesay in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. His face “would’ve been seasoned with wisdom lines and wispy gray hairs,” much like the face captured by Terry Evans in his striking portrait Cliff Joseph (2015). Elsewhere, Adam Ekberg captures the radiance of the sun streaming through a forest canopy so vividly that “you can almost feel its warmth on your skin,” and you immediately realize that Till would have regularly experienced it, too. Images that evoke such universal sensations are “part of the exhibit’s brilliance.” Instead of offering a specific vision of the shape Till’s life might have taken, “each photograph compels us to make room for every version of who he could’ve been.”

Curator Sarah Elizabeth Lewis selected every image, but she didn’t work alone, said Susan Aurinko in Newcity. While poring over all 18,000 photographs in the MoCP collection, she regularly consulted with Wheeler Parker Jr., a minister who is now 87 and was Till’s cousin, best friend, and a witness to Till’s abduction by the two white men who lynched him. Once the photos were chosen, Lewis asked artists, scholars, and luminaries, including historian Lonnie G. Bunch III, singer John Legend, and painter Amy Sherald, to share their feelings stirred by the show’s title and any one of the images. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay chose Milton Rogovin’s informal, untitled portrait of a beautiful young Buffalo woman from his East Side, 1961-63 collection. “What we contemplate here is the girl that Emmett never got to meet,” DuVernay wrote. “The one who would have held his hand, and listened to his fears, and to his dreams.”

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