For the Balkinization Symposium on Death and Legal Scholarship
The question of how this era of “mass carnage” impacts the substance of my work, has become, for me, a question about grief. In this brief essay, I explore one of the most well-known (and oft-theorized) examples of public grief in the U.S.—the murder of Emmett Till—in an effort to understand what lessons Black feminist theory might have for undertaking legal scholarship at a time when death, trauma, and loss feel more inescapable than ever. After all, Black feminist theorists and scholars of African American history more generally have long reckoned with the burden of mass death and its resultant grief. As historian and cultural critic Saidiya Hartman has written, “Grief is a central term in the political vocabulary of the diaspora.” (758).
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Emmett Till was a 14-year-old Black
boy who, while visiting family in Mississippi, was lynched by two white men.
Till’s body was found days later in a river – unrecognizable due to the
violence done to him. His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted on having an open
casket at his funeral. She allowed photos of his disfigured body to be taken
and publicized. In her words: “Let
the people see what I see.” By holding her son’s funeral with an open
casket, Mobley invited a public mourning, thereby transforming her personal
loss into a political act. Till’s murder and its publicity—and
his open casket in particular—have been credited with galvanizing
the Civil Rights Movement.
Understanding the power of Mobley’s
decision requires that we also remember the context in which she was living. Lynchings
had long been public. Some were advertised in newspapers. Souvenirs were taken
from the bodies of the dead men and women. There were postcards. In other
words, lynchings were often spectacles
of suffering by design– and their visibility and publicity furthered a
notion that Black deaths and Black suffering were but another way of
reinforcing white supremacy.
But Mobley shifted the framing of
this publicity – from a celebration of white supremacist violence to a mourning
of the devastation wrought by this racism. Her actions suggest that she well
understood what poet Audre
Lorde would articulate nearly two decades later, that her silence would not
protect her. Grieving her son quietly and privately would not shield her from
the reality of his murder or the further insult of his killers’ acquittal and
later public
confession. Lorde writes,
I was going to die, if not sooner
then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not
protected me. Your silence will not protect you. . . . Visibility which makes
most of us vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest
strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether
or not we speak. (29-30).
Whether or not Mobley had held her son’s funeral with an
open casket, his absence from her life would have remained the same. Silence
could not protect her from the violence of his death. Being silent is an
imperfect and unpredictable protection at best – and the isolation
that silence can fuel only adds more weight to the grief of understanding one’s
own corporeal vulnerability.
Personally, I have found that the
grief borne of racist violence is an uncanny feeling. The violence inflicted
upon this “other” body makes me aware of the vulnerability
of my own. And this awareness of vulnerability is something that these
pandemics (the pandemics of racism and of Covid) share with one another: they
threaten our bodies and our livelihoods; our loved ones are at risk; and we
have limited agency with respect to how we can protect ourselves. And crucially
– we are not all able to protect ourselves equally.
Yet, it is not only our
bodies that are implicated in this grief, but also our sense of time. The loss
is not discrete; it does not exist solely in the past. Instead, we are mourning
something that has
happened, is happening, and will happen again—which means that the grief is
both anticipatory and delayed. Anticipatory grief is what happens when you feel
that more loss is yet to come – when you learn of a death (be it due to Covid
or racist violence) and you feel both the immediate loss and also what that
loss signals: that more deaths are on the horizon. Mobley’s decision to have an
open casket engaged with these feelings of future loss: the image of Emmett’s
brutalized face could not be relegated to the past. Instead, Till’s death became
cemented in the public imaginary as an enduring
symbol of the grief engendered by unchecked racism.
Thinking about grief as simultaneously
preemptive and continuous, draws out the ways in which we are tied to one
another in a network of
vulnerability* – it pulls our attention to
our connectedness and the feeling that violence against one of us implicates
all of us. It also challenges our ways
of seeing and thinking about death and suffering. Theorizing grief as
ongoing invites us to ask about the conditions that made it possible, and about
the systems and institutions that might make normalize certain deaths and
suffering.
A grief-informed scholarly approach
also demands a commitment to the messiness of legacies of violence. It
encourages (and perhaps requires) a creativity and expansiveness
with respect to how we think about evidence in our scholarship (e.g., what gets
to count, which kinds of knowledge and forms of evidence are valued) and similarly,
asks that we look as broadly as possible when we’re trying to assess the impact
of violence. It’s not only death tolls, court cases, or legislation that matter,
but also the art, stories,
rituals, and emotions
that emerge out of, and in response to, violence.
To put it differently, the legacy
of Till’s murder far exceeds the acquittal of his killers, or failed attempts
to pass anti-lynching legislation. Rather, Emmett Till is part of a violent “past
that is not yet past” (Sharpe, 31). To make sense of his death—and others
like it—requires engaging and accepting the power of grief to move between
bodies and across time. Doing so is the only way to fully see the contours and
consequences of violence, as Mamie Till Mobley once demanded.
* Moderator’s note: In addition to the linked work, the
importance of Farr’s point about a “network of vulnerability” is reflected in Martha
Fineman’s scholarship and the Vulnerablility
and the Human Condition Initiative.