What if Emmett Till lived?
What if he had returned home still a child, alive and free? Emmett Till should have been able to celebrate his 85th birthday this year. If Emmett Till Lived—an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago and a freestanding book by Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, in collaboration with Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr.—urges us to ask, "What have we done in the wake of the violent injustice that ended his life? If Emmett Till had lived, what would that life have required of us all?"
If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground invites viewers to chronologically unfurl the life Emmett Till was denied, and the beauty that would have come for him and for us all.
If Emmett Till Lived: A Creative Monument is a photographic account of a childhood lived and adulthood unrealized, expanding the collective arena for considering how freedom has been secured on American ground.
Milton Rogovin, East Side, 1961
"Photographer Milton Rogovin found her on the East Side in 1961. A young sister leaning into daylight, eyes closed, chin lifted to the future. When I gaze upon her, it is impossible not to think of what Emmett Till never got to have."
Leonard Freed, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Parade, after Nomination for Nobel Peace Prize, Baltimore, Maryland, 1964
"We often overlook the magnetism of Dr. King as reflected, not in a funeral speech, but in this interaction in black Baltimore. King symbolized the possibilities that were denied to many in Jim Crow America."
Leonard Freed, Harlem, New York, 1963
"I chose this image because it insists on joy. If Emmett Till had lived, his life would have included afternoons like this one, children playing in the street, water everywhere, laughter you can almost hear."
Tom Arndt, Prom Couple, Navy Pier, from Changing Chicago, 1987
"This photograph becomes more than a portrait of marriage; it becomes a meditation on stolen futures and the enduring power of Black love, Black tenderness, and Black possibility."
Edward Curtiss Colver, Wasted Youth Flip, 1981
"This photograph reminds me that Black life is not only struggle or survival. It is also motion, rhythm, daring, and release."
Michael Kenna, Fifty-Five Birds, Wolverton, Buckinghamshire, England, 1991
"If birds fly over the rainbow, why can't I?"
Walter Rosenblum, Hopscotch, 1952
"A time of innocence."
In the Press
"Parker said he is pleased, 'if you live long enough, you come to something like this where everything comes out.'"
“...a reminder of how an image can transform the imagination."
"[If Emmett Till Lived] imagines not only the young life Emmett lost, but the decades he was denied."
"As the struggle for basic equality carries on...a new exhibition asks what Till's life would have been had he lived."
Vision & Justice
Vision & Justice, founded by Sarah Lewis, is an award-winning initiative that generates original research, curricula, and programs that reveal the foundational role of visual culture in America's representational democracy.