These students carried the vandalized memorial sign for Emmett Till, a teenager who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, and laid it at the base of a Confederate statue on their campus.
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00:00It's another sign of white supremacy, and we just can't support that no more.
00:18I remember a tear like fell out of my face to just have like us two black men from the Mississippi
00:25Delta where Emmett Till was killed carrying this sign and to draw like the symbolism
00:30of white supremacy and how it connects to like the murder of Emmett Till.
00:55Emmett Till was this young boy who was living in Chicago. He came down to the Mississippi Delta to
01:02Money, Mississippi to visit his uncle, Uncle Moe's. And while he was there, him and his cousins went
01:08to this store, Bryant's Grocery. This is where the story gets confusing because there's different
01:12accounts of what happens. From his cousin's perspective, what happens is he was joking
01:15with them saying that he had a white girlfriend or something like that, and he whistled at this
01:19white woman. Nobody really knows what happened. She accused him of much more than that. It's
01:24possible that nothing happened.
01:39And initially they wanted to put his box in a coffin and ordered that coffin to stay closed
01:43and wanted to bury him in Tallahatchie County so that his story would die with him.
01:54And at that point is when they held this trial. Equally as impactful as this, you know, horrible
02:06hate-fueled violence was this completely unjust trial where it was just a white man on the trial
02:12and within minutes of deliberating, found him innocent.
02:24I started to think more about the guys being so comfortable taking the picture and showing
02:46off really their privilege and saying that, yeah, I can do this because I'm a white male
02:52and who's going to stop me? Maybe how the people at the time with the injustice of the two guys
02:57being acquitted, they were showing what they could do and what the law would allow them to do.
03:02And you face no repercussions at all for your actions. But in a different way, we try to remove
03:15a Confederate statue from the campus, which we find oppressive and is almost impossible to do.
03:22I think it's important to remember the story of Emmett Till because if we can continue to
03:29draw upon the stories that bring out the significant flaws and even the significant
03:37positives in the way that we operate in a society. This really impactful, powerful event took place,
03:45less than an hour and a half away from where we go to school. And so I thought that was a really
03:48important thing to acknowledge and to kind of keep alive on campus.
03:52It offers us an opportunity to really address it head on, to have honest conversations,
03:58and to really understand that we're stronger together and
04:01addressing these issues can propel us to new heights.