'Why Don't Y'all Let That Die?' Telling The Emmett Till Story In Mississippi
A memorial first installed in 2008 to mark the spot where 14-year-old Emmett Till was recovered from the Tallahatchie River in 1955 has been repeatedly vandalized – shot-through with bullet holes. The sign was removed last month after an image surfaced of three white University of Mississippi fraternity brothers posing next to it with guns.
Civil rights tour guide Jessie Jaynes-Diming says it was painful to see.
"It would be the same thing if I had a Bible up there, or if I had the flag up there and you shot it up," she says.
Jaynes-Diming is part of the , which is trying to preserve sites like this. Till, a black teenager visiting from Chicago, was brutally killed in Mississippi after allegedly violating Jim Crow social norms. The murder propelled the civil rights movement, and today his name is still invoked when innocent blood is shed in racial violence.
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