[Note: Today I am turning this space over to my good friend the writer and playwright Ifa Bayeza. Ifa's critically acclaimed play "The Ballad of Emmett Till" completed a successful run at the Goodman Theater here in Chicago a year ago, where it premiered. She recently received the prestigious Edgar Award (as in Edgar Allan Poe) for Best Play. Here Bayeza shares her observations about the deep significance of August 28th (today) as it relates to Emmett Till's death and more recent events that we should be cognizant of.]

August 28th: Remembrance and 
Reflection - 2008, 1963, 1955
By Ifa Bayeza

One year ago today, Barack Obama accepted the nomination of the Democratic Party for the office of President of the United States. It was a crystal Denver evening, a twilight sky. He stood before a crowd of nearly 90,000 packed into the Denver Stadium, and in addition, before a record breaking global audience of millions. It was a groundbreaking event, the first African American Presidential nominee, a landmark full of promise. In his eloquent acceptance speech, Mr. Obama spoke often of this notion of “promise,” chronicling our nation’s progress from its revolutionary birth over two hundred thirty years ago. It was fitting that the date marked the anniversary of another pivotal American event, another day of promise.  “Forty-five years ago today,” said Mr. Obama, “[that promise] brought Americans from every corner of this land to stand together on a Mall in Washington, before Lincoln’s Memorial to hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.” The event, of course, was the 1963 March on Washington, the “young preacher,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Another anniversary is marked by this date, another pivotal American event. Fifty-four years ago, while visiting his family in Mississippi, fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Louis Till was abducted and killed by a group of white men for the alleged offense of whistling at a white store clerk. In the desolate hours of a moonless Sunday morning, he was subjected to a ruthless torture that brought about his death shortly after dawn, August 28, 1955. Two moments of triumph and one of high tragedy ... Perhaps it is serendipity that these three events share the same date; however, their impact and transformational power are undeniable. 

Among African Americans, the story of Emmett Till has continued to resonate through the decades, rippling through time in wave after wave of influence. His murder and his mother's subsequent decision to have an open-casket funeral are believed by many to mark the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement – for just cause. That same year, 1955, on an otherwise ordinary December afternoon, when Rosa Parks boarded a Montgomery Alabama bus, she was thinking about Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. It was that reflection that caused Mrs. Parks to refuse to give up her seat, to refuse on that day to acquiesce to Jim Crow segregation. The ensuing Montgomery bus boycott gave Martin Luther King, Jr., his first national platform. 

A few years later, Sunflower County, Mississippi native Fannie Lou Hamer, upon seeing the brother of J.W. Milam, one of Emmett’s confessed murderers, among the sheriff’s deputies confronting her when she attempted to register to vote, decided that day that she would go to jail, rather than submit. She committed her life to activism, no matter the cost. The decision took her all the way to the 1964 National Democratic Convention. This forty-four year old sharecropper’s public plea before the party’s Credential Committee brought the all-white Dixiecrat stranglehold of the Democratic Party to an end, thus paving the way for Mr. Obama’s ascension nearly fifty years later. Muhammad Ali, who is the same age as Emmett would have been, derailed a train in a teenage act of protest upon hearing of Emmett's murder. With the maturing of his consciousness, Ali became a symbol of black excellence and power, worldwide. Like him, current NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, civil rights scholar Cleveland Sellers and many other activists who came of age in that time, credit the Till case with the beginning of their political awakening. Emmett was the first spark of consciousness for black youth across the country and he became a symbol of the youth-centered character of the Movement from thenceforth.

The event bore other emblems of the coming Civil Rights Movement. The spontaneous outpouring of grief of the 50,000 plus mourners who lined the streets of Chicago for the viewing of Emmett’s body foreshadowed the mass, non-violent protest gathering that would be the hallmark of the Movement. As President Obama noted in his speech celebrating the 100th anniversary of the NAACP, when Emmett Till’s uncle Mose Wright summoned “the courage to testify against the men who killed his nephew,” Wright’s dramatic open court challenge to Jim Crow was a harbinger of the scores of civil rights trials to come. The work of journalists across the color line during the court proceedings set the blueprint for how Civil Rights would be covered and for the interracial cooperation that would also be the Movement’s signature. The boycott of the Milam-Bryant family stores, driving the family of Emmett's killers out of business, predated the Montgomery bus boycott by nearly a year.

Then we come to a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, eight years to the day after Emmett’s death. When Dr. King spoke about dreams deferred, he was perhaps referencing the lost promise of Emmett Till, the first child soldier casualty of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The unwitting hero, in his life, in his death, and in his inspiration, propelled us all.

The profound sense of loss and the impassioned commitment that Emmett Till inspired in my generation is matched by the profound sense of hope that President Obama has inspired in this generation. Just as we all became Emmett, a whole generation of youth today can imagine becoming President.

 So when I think of August 28th, that bright white sunlight on the DC Mall and that glorious twilight evening in Denver, I also remember the dark and perilous night when a young boy on the threshold of manhood walked alone, and how his journey changed the course of our nation. From desperation to inspiration, from tragedy and triumph, this date in history will for many reasons be a day to remember and honor -- always. We should celebrate, but let us not forget the great cost and sacrifice of others, delivering such possibility and promise to us. And let us not squander the moment, but as our forty-fourth president has suggested, “seize our future, each and every day.”

Ifa Bayeza is the recipient of a Eugene O’Neill National Playwright’s Center Fellowship and the 2009 Edgar Award for her play, "The Ballad of Emmett Till," which received its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre in May 2008.

Photographs (from top): Barack Obama at Democratic Convention, 2008; Emmett Till, in life and in death; crowds at Emmett Till's funeral; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. addresses crowds at the March on Washington, 1963)

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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey
Photo © by Jason Smikle
About Me
About Me
Chicago, IL, United States
I began making photographs in 1969 after seeing the "Harlem On My Mind" exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had inherited my first camera the year before from my godfather Artie Miller when I was fifteen years old. I began my first project "Harlem, USA" as a direct result of that exhibition and my own family's history in the Harlem community. Born in Queens, NY my formal training began by apprenticing to local commercial and fashion photographer Levy J. Smith and then later studying at the School of Visual Arts with Larry Siegel, William Broecker, Shelley Rice and Sid Kaplan. I completed my undergraduate work at Empire State College under the guidance of Mel Rosenthal and Joe Goldberg and did my MFA at Yale University in the graduate photography program under the watchful and rigorous eyes of Tod Papageorge and Richard Benson, along with Lois Conner, Frank Gohlke, Susan Kismaric and Joel Sternfeld. Classes with Robert Farris Thompson and Michael Romer significantly rounded out my graduate work. A former Guggenheim and NEA fellow, I am currently Professor of Art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where I have taught since 1998.
"What's Going On?"
"What's Going On?"
Marvin Gaye's signature song "What's Going On?"--a musical critique of a world gone off track--provides an apt framework for looking at the role of art and cultural production in the larger society.

With so much art being made at all ends of the market, it's always a good thing for artists to look both forward and back in trying to access the role that art can play in a larger society, a society that actually exists largely outside of the distorting bubble of the Art World. When one of my students recently answered the question of why she was in school in an MFA program with, "So I can be a part of the system," I knew it was time for a reassessment and a forum from which to look at the various histories in my own little corner of the art and "real" world.

Artists used to be the ones who led the charge to challenge the system; they were the proverbial "fly in the buttermilk," the monkey wrench that mucked up the system and made it act, function, and exist in new ways. Artists were the ones who created paradigms of everything the system was not. James Baldwin once said, "Artists are here to disturb the peace."

This blog will range freely over a range of issues, highlighting individuals, events, and ideas that provide a catalyst for thought and reflection. Hopefully for younger artists it might provide a sense of a world both in and outside of the so-called art world, and hopefully provoke a conversation about the relationship between the two while offering a thought or two about just what ones work might be about as one attempts to engage both history and the contemporary moment.

For others this blog might serve as a window into how one particular artist, after three decades of practice, sees and thinks about the vast world of human social and aesthetic experience. Consider this my own small commentary or my brain periodically laid bare for your perusal and consideration.

Feel free to use the "Comments" button to share your thoughts and responses if so provoked.
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