Freedom on American Ground

What if Emmett Till lived? What if he had returned home still a child, alive and free?

If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground is organized by curator, art and cultural historian, and scholar Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, in collaboration with Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr.—Emmett Till's cousin, best friend, and the last surviving witness to his kidnapping.

In the wake of what would have been Till’s 85th birthday, Lewis and Parker join individuals and institutions around the country to ask: What might Emmett Till’s life have been had he safely boarded the train back home to Chicago? What would that life have required of us all? What has come of the unjust, violent denial of his right to life?

‍If Emmett Till Lived is a space to invite viewers to reimagine possibility. Unfurled in the exhibition is the full life Till could have experienced beyond age 14, and what that life could have meant for our own, through the work of more than 110 historic and contemporary photographers.

Mamie Till-Mobley had the prophetic wisdom to understand that witnessing was central for American democracy. Her motto was, “Let the world see.” We can let the world see. Yet is it enough today to let people see? The question today is what will make us all see the facts of history? 

At a moment when history is being fiercely contested—and there remains violent opposition to the very idea of honoring Till’s memory—this project serves as a creative monument to his unlived life and continuing legacy. Through pictures drawn from the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago’s permanent collection, viewers are invited to imagine and meditate on the roughly 70 years Till was denied. 

There is not one photograph of Emmett Till in the exhibition. There is not one image of the violence he endured or the people who caused it. Instead, the images evoke the experiences, relationships, and milestones that might have shaped his unrealized childhood and adulthood, and gesture to what threatened the right to his own existence. Till, his mother, and his community are represented through a universe of proxies—other children, mothers, friends, kin—to map and offer into alternative timelines that should have been possible.

Throughout the show are reflections by Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr. as he viewed the art with Sarah Elizabeth Lewis. Alongside are reflections from civic and cultural leaders who geographically represent Till’s untaken journey home from Mississippi to Chicago and who selected images to represent their hopes for Till’s unlived life. They include Lonnie G. Bunch III, Chelsea Clinton, Ava DuVernay, Alicia Garza, Sherrilyn Ifill, John Legend, Brent Leggs, Franklin Leonard, Wynton Marsalis, Dr. Marvel Parker, Rep. Ayanna Pressley, RaMell Ross, Amy Sherald, Bryan Stevenson, Hank Willis Thomas, Hamza Walker, Deborah Willis, and more. They offer us a way of honoring Till’s life, not only his death, and guide us to the possibilities of the lives we might make together. 

There were many Tills. There are many Tills. Till’s name and memory continue to shape struggles for racial justice and to demand that America confront the violence of its past. Indeed, through the work of leaders past and present—from Ida B. Wells to Medgar Evers to Sherrilyn Ifill and Bryan Stevenson—we have come to reckon with the history of racial terror as a tactic used to enforce racial hierarchies.

In early September, in Chicago, the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, the site of Emmett Till’s funeral, will unveil a re-creation of its historic sign and illuminate it for the first time, heralding the opening of our collective remembrance. If Emmett Till Lived joins this and other institutions—from the organizations that steward Till’s legacy as well as the Equal Justice Initiative, the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American Art and Culture—to demonstrate that the search for America is inseparable from the search for Till himself.

Till’s life hovers over this collective arena and in that suspension, places viewers over American ground to see what it wrought, and the work that remains.