Remembering Emmett Till

October 23, 2015 | Address at University of Pennsylvania

Note: This presentation on the life of Emmett Till (1941-1955) by Dr. Monteiro at the University of Pennsylvania was part of an event sponsored by The Black Men of Penn in the School of Social Policy and Practice, led by Chad Lassiter.

---

This is more than an honor. This is something that Chad [Lassiter] and I have been talking about for some time. The 60th anniversary of the assassination of Emmett Louis Till, perhaps the first great martyr and sacrifice in what became known as the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. And as significant as that event is, it is also important because it brought to the stage of history a great hero and a great leader of the civil rights movement, his heroic mother, Mamie Till-Mobley. A name that is often forgotten, but we must raise her name up. Because if it were not for her, we would not know the name Emmett Louis Till. Now, let’s just take a step back, and I hope that we will have the opportunity to engage in questions and answers and discussion about this event. Emmett Till, in the summer of 1955, went to Mississippi to visit his relatives and his grandfather in particular. Emmett was one of those very precocious young men. His mother says that he was very good in math, he was good at spelling. His cousins tell us that Emmett was a kind of a fun-loving guy, a jokester. We also know that Emmett had what his mother describes as a speech problem. 

And so when he could not get a word out, sometimes he would whistle, which will explain some of the events that occur afterwards. Well, Emmett went to Mississippi. You know, back in those days, if you were from the North and Emmett was from Chicago, going to the South could either be a grand adventure or something very terrifying. Because the South and especially Mississippi, and of course Chicago back then, was known as a suburb of Alabama and Mississippi — because so many of the African Americans that came to Chicago came from Mississippi. Just like so many of us who came North to Philadelphia, came from South Carolina and Virginia, maybe Georgia, maybe Florida. But Emmett, I think, saw this as a great adventure. He was going to have fun. He was going to be with his kids, cousins, maybe pick some cotton, if you could call that fun, or play in the fields while other people picked cotton. One day, after he and his cousins had been playing in the cotton field, they decided to go to town and they went to Money, Mississippi, a very small town in the Black Belt of Mississippi. Mississippi has both a very dark history in the history of Afro America and it has a history of resistance. W.E.B. Du Bois, in his great work Black Reconstruction in America, has a chapter on the proletariat in Mississippi. And he talked about the three states that had Black majorities after the Civil War: South Carolina, Louisiana and Mississippi. And merely by acquiring the vote, Black folk could have controlled the government of Mississippi. 

Du Bois referred to this as the possibility of the establishment of a dictatorship of the Black proletariat. Let me just explain that word for a minute or that concept for a moment. It was not a dictatorship in the pejorative sense, in the sense that it is generally used in popular and political discourse in the United States, as in, “We are a democracy here and everybody else that we don’t like is a dictatorship.” He didn’t mean it in that sense. He meant a democratic government that would arise out of the anti-slavery and freedom aspirations of Black people, which would be consolidated as a dictatorship for democracy. An irony if you will, but that’s what he meant. And because you had a Black majority in Mississippi, the fierceness of the pushback against the Black majority was something that we can only imagine. And that pushback against the Black majority continued into the 1950s. In other words, the defeat of the Black vote and the defeat of the possibility of Mississippi being a stronghold of Black power in the heart of the Cotton Kingdom initiated what we could refer to as a long racial counter-revolution against Black people. A terroristic counter-revolution which would eventuate in Mississippi being one of the great centers of lynching and terror against Black folk. And thus we must put the assassination of Emmett Till in the framework of this long racial counter-revolution against the African American people. A counter-revolution that we are still living today in a different form, but nonetheless a counter-revolution. Emmett, in going South, did not know that he was going into the heart of a counter-revolution where all Black people were targets of terror. 

He did not know that his childhood, being 14 years old, did not make a difference. He did not know the racial protocols of Mississippi. In other words, that every Black person, every Black man was named “Boy” and every Black woman was a “Girl”. A protocol that said every Black person must refer to every white male as “Mister” and every white female as “Miss”. These protocols enforced a form of racial subordination and to let you know and let you be reminded always what your place is. It was more than just the signs that said “Colored” and “white” bathrooms or colored and white water fountains or the fact that you couldn’t go into the downtown area. And if you went in there and wanted to buy a pair of shoes, you couldn’t try them on. The idea being if Black feet were in those shoes, white people wouldn’t buy them. There’s perhaps been nothing like this in human history. If a white person were walking down the street and a Black person approached them, the Black person would have to get off of the sidewalk into the street and allow the white person to pass by. Emmett went into this cauldron of race and class repression, happy to be with his southern relatives. When he and his cousins went to Money, Mississippi, to the city, as it were, to have some fun, Emmett went into the store to buy some bubble gum and put the money in the owner of the store, his wife’s hand and he got the bubble gum. When he was outside, they were outside, the wife came out and she claimed that Emmett whistled at her. 

Now, whether he whistled or not is in dispute as far as I’m concerned, because his mother said whenever he tried to get certain words out and they wouldn’t come out, he was taught to whistle something like a whistle. However, the store owner’s wife went and told her husband that this arrogant young kid from up North whistled at her. Now, let’s be reminded, Emmett is only 14 years old. Tamir Rice was only 12 years old in Cleveland. Michael Brown was only 17. But in their defenses, the white cops said they thought Tamir was 21 years old. In Ferguson, the cop said he felt threatened by Michael Brown because he looked like a huge gorilla. So the perception of Black folk through the racial gaze of white supremacy is no matter what your age is, you always appear as a threat. 

The idea also is that while every Black man in Mississippi was a boy, every Black man, irregardless of their ages, were perceived as threats and as men. A couple of days after that event at the store, the owner of the store and a relative of his came to Emmett Till’s grandfather’s home late in the night armed with pistols. Till’s grandfather knew what that meant. Don’t forget the Ku Klux Klan were called Night Riders. They came at night. They said, “We’re looking for the boy from Chicago.” Mose Wright, the grandfather, politely showed them where Emmett was sleeping. They took Emmett from his grandfather’s house and the details of what happened next, we don’t know. However, we do know that Emmett did not bow down to them as they threatened him in the car. 

It must have been something for them, so they were going to teach him a lesson to take back to Chicago. Emmett didn’t come back that night. Three days later they were informed that his body was found in the river with a 70 pound fan of a cotton gin around his neck. When they pulled him out, the signs of the most barbaric and savage murder were all over his body. The sheriff of the county there wanted to quickly bury the body. In fact, Emmett Till’s relatives there had already prepared to bury his body in the area right outside the Black church. However, his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, along with politicians from Chicago, forced them to stop that burial because they wanted to cover up what had been done and that the body be brought back to Chicago. 

When his body arrived in Chicago, it was in a box, a pine box. The undertaker said to Mamie Till at that time, her name was Mamie Till-Bradley. He said, you don’t want to see what’s inside this box. Mrs. Bradley insisted, I want to see what’s in there. He said, well, you go home and come back in a few hours and I’ll have the casket, the box open. She had told him, if you can’t open it, if you have a hammer and a screwdriver, I’ll open it. She returned in a few hours. And she says that when she got about three blocks away, a terrible odor overtook her. You know, back then, I don’t think Black undertakers had those refrigerators where you put bodies. And as she got closer to the funeral parlor, the smell became even more overwhelming. And when she got there, her father was one side, her brother was on the other side of her, holding her up, and another relative in back of her. The box was open. Mrs. Bradley told those men, she said, you know, leave me alone, you know, get back, she said, because I have work to do. 

Let me just tell you a little bit about Mamie Till-Bradley. She was in her early 30s at this point. She was a good-looking woman, what you would even call a pretty woman. She and Emmett had recently moved out of her mother’s house. She had her own apartment and you know, that’s a big deal. And she had a job, she was making money. She was one of those mothers of Black males, of Black men that we see all over our community. She reminds me of my mother. Those women who, unlike their mothers, didn’t work in the houses of white women, they worked in factories, they were in unions, they made their own money, they were independent. She was that kind of woman. She said that — well, I wasn’t really concerned about all of the events going on in the world. Like most of us, until these events hit home. She was concerned about her life and raising her precocious young son, who she said was almost like a brother to her because her mother took care of Emmett while she went to work. And so her mother was almost like Emmett’s mother and her mother. So they were like sister and brother. We’ve all experienced that. So again, Emmett was filled, surrounded by this love that only Black women can give to Black sons. A love that only Black men know about. It’s that love you never experience again in your life. That might explain some of the difficulties in love once you get out of your mother’s house. It’s that special kind of love, almost like a love supreme. 

But she wasn’t concerned about the world. Why should she be? She couldn’t make an impact on the great events of that day. United States, only a couple years earlier, had completed a bloody war in Korea. And I’m certain she knew young men who returned from the war in Korea looking for jobs. She probably did not know about the conference held in a small town in Indonesia in 1955, April. The great Bandung Conference of Afro-Asian solidarity. She didn’t know about that. Probably, she was hardly aware that W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson and other Black outspoken leaders of Black people were under indictment by the Justice Department as agents of a foreign government because they stood up against nuclear weapons. W.E.B. Du Bois would famously say when the FBI came to arrest him and handcuffed him and he was being accused of being an agent of a foreign government. He said, “I’m not an agent of any government, I’m an agent of peace.” And they said to boys that for you to stand up against the military and foreign policy of the United States, you must be a communist. And that was the dirty word back then. And Du Bois answered him in ways that he often answered his detractors. He said, “Blessed are the peaceful for they shall be called communists. Is that praise for the communists, the condemnation for the peacemakers?”

She probably was unaware of all of this going on around her. But she said with the murder of Emmett, it all hit home. And in a kind of a metaphysical way, all of that strength that is deep in the DNA of the Africans who were enslaved in this country and all of those women and men who were sacrificed and who stood up against racial repression, all of that boiled up in her. And she said to her father and the other relatives, let me go, I have work to do. And then she viewed her 14-year-old son’s body. His face was severely mutilated. In fact, he looked like a monster. They had tortured him. She said the first thing she noticed is that his tongue had been pulled out of his mouth. And then she noticed that they had cut one of his ears off. That they had used a hatchet to separate his face from the back of his skull. And then she looked and there was a hole in the side of his head and she could see light on the other side. They had shot him through the head, obviously in close range. After she had viewed the body, they were preparing for the funeral. The undertaker advised her, “Mrs. Bradley, we have to have a closed casket.” And she made the famous statement, which echoes through the ages of this moment: I want the world to see what they did to my child. 

One of the great ironies of history is that 14 years later, a young revolutionary in Chicago, by the name of Fred Hampton, would be murdered by the Chicago police at the instructions of the FBI while he was in his bed. Now the reason I bring up Fred Hampton is because Mamie Till-Bradley babysat Fred Hampton. And Fred Hampton’s funeral was held in the same church that Emmett Till’s was. Thousands of people viewed Emmett’s body and the horror of what had happened to him. People who avoided consciousness, who avoided taking up responsibility to resist, suddenly found the strength to stand up and say enough is enough. One of those people was the great Rosa Parks, the co-mother along with Mamie Till-Mobley, of the great civil rights movement. 

In December of 1955, Rosa Parks, riding one of the segregated buses in Birmingham, Alabama, pardon me, Montgomery, Alabama, said that she wasn’t going to give a seat up. She was a working-class woman coming from work, very similar to Mamie Till-Mobley. Working-class women. And when asked, why did you decide on that day not to give your seat up? Rosa Parks said, I reflected on Emmett Till and his mother. And it wasn’t just Rosa Parks. Tens of thousands of African Americans, certainly the leadership of the Montgomery movement, the black folk in Montgomery who walked over 380 some days in a boycott of the buses until the segregated system ended. I’m certain that on those days when they didn’t feel like walking, they thought about Emmett Till and his heroic mother. I’m certain Malcolm X, only a few years out of the penitentiary and now a minister in the Nation of Islam, his noble rage against the system of white supremacy was inspired by Mamie Till-Mobley. 

There are a whole lot of people in this room, including myself, who as children came to a sense of consciousness and dignity when all the Black nation in this country, the Black press, carried on its front pages the picture of Emmett Till in his casket. Jet magazine, Ebony magazine, the Philadelphia Tribune. Back then you did not have the internet, but you had this rich network of journalism and literature known as the Black press. There was a fledgling Black kind of radio at that time, played mainly the blues and gospel on Sunday. And they began not just to play music, but to talk about issues. This is in 1955.

A trial, if you want to call it that, of the two white men who killed Emmett Till took place. It’s not really a trial. It was what we would expect in Mississippi, where Black life never mattered, where a Black person could be killed for the slightest perceived offense. And if there were a trial, it was a kangaroo court. And so within a matter of minutes, the all-white jury came back. Not guilty. Not guilty. About a week later, the two murderers gave an interview to Life magazine and boldly admitted that they had murdered Emmett Till. But this was a counter-revolutionary situation. And what do we mean counter-revolution? When was the revolution? Are we talking about the Revolution of 1776? No, we’re talking about the real revolution, the anti-slavery uprising. And it was a revolution not because, quote, “Lincoln freed the slaves.” It was a revolution because the slaves freed themselves. The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 changed the dynamics and geography of the fight. 165 to 200,000 Blacks joined the Union army, men and women. The first woman officer in the American army was Harriet Tubman. There were hundreds of Black spies and others carrying out other functions against the Confederacy. 

But the great act that turned the tide was what Du Bois called the general strike of the slaves, where over 500,000 put down their tools, slowed down work, or refused to work at all, thus undermining and literally collapsing the economy of the South and making it thereby impossible for it to continue. The war up to 1863, up to the fact of the Africans getting involved, it was not really a war. Look at the facts. How do you explain the North had twice the population of the South? The North was far richer than the South. How could the south hold out? It is because the North was not committed to fighting to free Black people. In fact, Lincoln had offered the South many compromises to come back into the Union, you can keep your property, meaning your slaves. In 1862 and 1863, in the North, there were anti-draft riots where white men said, we will not fight to free niggers. And for every white man who refused to fight, there was a Black man prepared to fight. So the War of 1861-1865 was the great American Revolution and the great liberation struggle. Four million people were emancipated from enslavement. Reconstruction, which followed that, 1865-1877, empowered Africans to vote. And with the vote, they began to rewrite the constitutions of the Southern states. They began to do what had never been conceived, to establish a public education system throughout the South. And they said to white folk, you don’t have to come to these schools, but they’re available to you. And many white people preferred to stay up in the hills. “I’d rather die as a poor white man than to send my kid to a school with niggers.” You ever hear that before? I could take you to some places in Philadelphia. But the fact of the matter is that this was a revolution. Remember I said that. The defeat of reconstruction in 1877 began a long counter-revolution. What was one of the great achievements of a revolution? A public education system in the South. What do we have today? The destruction of public education. 

And I understand there’s somebody here speaking at Wharton who was a representative of that school of thought. Make everything a charter school, privatize everything, take the most beautiful buildings that many of us went to school in and give them to developers. Put trendy bars for white gentrifiers and yuppies on the roof of Bok, the vocational high school, by the way, where the great Lee Morgan graduated from. You might not know him and I can talk about that later, so Mamie Till-Mobley’s act and then Rosa Parks and then the Montgomery movement came as blows or blowback against the counter-revolution that began with the overturning of Black Reconstruction in 1877. They stood up against a terroristic regime in the South which was supported by the North. And so the first great martyr in the civil rights movement is Emmett Louis Till. 

The first great hero in the civil rights movement is Mamie Till-Mobley. Let us never forget that name. Let’s go forward. Where are we today? How do we explain the continuing murders of Black young people in the streets of this country? How do we explain it? Even after it’s been exposed, even after it’s been condemned by politicians and the editorial board of the New York Times and the great liberal establishment, how does it continue? Well, I think we have to first of all look at the institutions of this country. This is not just a rogue cop killing a black person. We are talking about institutionalized violence to hold in control and in check a restive nation of people. It is not unlike the British and French presidents in Africa. It is not unlike what the King of Belgium did in the Congo. “We have to control these natives and the only way to control them ultimately is by force.” So what we are looking at is a nation of people occupied by a foreign military. 

A lot of people will say, well, you all get upset when a white cop kills a Black person. Why don’t you get as upset when another Black person kills a Black person? First of all, I don’t agree with that assumption that we do not get upset. We’re deeply upset. But the difference is we pay for one, the police. I didn’t pay that person who killed someone on the street. We’re talking therefore about institutionalized and state sponsored violence against Black folk. But if it were just the killing of Black people and we can name them in the streets. 

Of course I’m reminded of some of the more recent ones, Natasha McKenna. I don’t know how many of you have heard of her case in Fairfax County, Virginia. She was a schizophrenic woman who like most people who on medication sometimes decides, “I’m going to take a break from this. I want to feel normal.” She maybe acted out in Alexandria, Virginia, we really don’t know. The police officer said she assaulted him, but there’s no evidence of an assault on his body or anywhere else. But nonetheless she was arrested. She was ultimately taken from Alexandria, Virginia to Fairfax County where we encounter her, that is, we, the public encounter her through a video that was taken by the prison authorities of her extraction from her cell in Fairfax County. Now we have the evidence and the video because the woman who was the sheriff and is the sheriff in that area, a white woman driven by conscience. 

After the six white men who carried out the extraction were found not guilty, she said, “I must make this video public.” And when they were tried, happened in February, they were tried in June and by August she had released the video. And we come to know Natasha McKenna in the last moments of her life. You know, when they extract people from a cell, they have to video it. Any prison, they video it. So they were videoing this. Six white men dressed in hazmat uniforms from head to foot. She’s in a solitary confinement cell and of course they know they’re videoing her. So they’re going to act like they’re doing everything by the rules. Ms. McKenna, we’re coming in to get you. They didn’t mean Ms. McKenna. They didn’t see her as human. They opened the door and we see Ms. McKenna completely naked and they go in and they pull her out. And the last coherent words that we hear her saying as they drag her out, “You told me you weren’t going to kill me.” And they dragged her out, they slammed her to the ground. While they’re constantly saying, and this is their cynicism and a manifestation of how morally evil they are: “Ms. McKenna, stop resisting. Ms. McKenna, stop resisting.” She wasn’t resisting. Then they claimed at the trial that she weighed 180 pounds and had superhuman strength. Now where have we heard that before? But we see in the video, she’s about five-foot-three, 130 pounds. Six white men are on her. Her face is slammed into the ground. She is, you know, they said she’s making animal-like sounds. We heard her say, “My stomach, you’re hurting my stomach.” This was an assault, a rape, if you will. They then end up tasing her about six times. After 45 to 47 minutes, they take her in this, put her in this chair, this restraining chair and take her to a hospital where a few days later she dies. Oxygen had ceased going to her brain several times. So by the time they got her to the hospital, she was brain dead. Natasha McKenna was 37 years old. Again, no one was found guilty. We operated within the law. Which raises the next question. We need to think about the law. And when we think about the law, we have to think about the regime that upholds the law. And are we back to the thing of the Reconstruction era known as Black codes? There’s a different set of laws when it comes to Black people. 

But then there is unemployment and no education. Everybody knows, and it’s in study after study and every academic and politician will tell you this, that the ticket to success in modern economic, in modern economies is education. We know that. But in Philadelphia, we’re closing down public schools. We’re undermining curriculum. You know, they privatize the hiring of substitute teachers. Thousands of students in the public school still don’t have a permanent teacher at this late date in the semester. But then they say they don’t have any money. But have you heard of the 10 year tax abatement for gentrifiers and speculators? And let’s ask the question, how much taxes, how many taxes does Comcast pay? Big universities creating these gated communities, that they call universities for white people. As you know, I was unjustly removed from my position at Temple University. I can tell you that any Black woman or man that speaks up at any university in this country, including the liberal University of Pennsylvania, will be harassed and fined. And don’t protest at Community College of Philadelphia. Students exercising their right to protest, protested against the military and police recruiting at community college. They called this the militarization of the community college. And as one speaker at the rally said, they don’t recruit at the University of Pennsylvania or Drexel. This is the recruitment of working class, young people to police their own communities in the interest of property. So here we are, big universities with big endowments, gleaming buildings, a few Black professors, a lot of white,  young people in a city where poverty and extreme poverty is the highest among the ten largest cities in the country. 

But if you want to feel good about your city and you’re Black, you can say we have a Black mayor. We have a Black president of the city council. I mean, if you want to feel good, if that makes you feel good, if symbology means more to you than what happens on the ground, if you feel good that we have a Black face in White House. I mean that’s your prerogative. 

But let’s look at the condition of Black people after three of the last four mayors of the city of Philadelphia were Black. I remember when we didn’t have such a gleaming downtown, but we had a public school system. I remember when there was not all of this talk about this being one of the best cities for people to come to and when we didn’t have the Pope visiting or the Democratic Party having its convention here. But I remember that young men and women, even if they didn’t graduate from high school, but if they did, they maybe went to Bok or Dobbins and had a skill. At least when we graduated, we could read, if not on the 12th grade level, at least on the 10th grade level. And even then, we could go to the waterfront and get a job, even if you had a prison record. Or you could go to one of the factories, garment factories, where many women, Black women for the first time were in unions and were making a decent income and didn’t have to depend upon a man. They had their own money. 

But look at the city now. A gleaming downtown surrounded by poverty. This is what we call the neoliberal city. These are the policies that were put in place over 30 years ago. And these policies say, give it to the rich and it will trickle down to the rest of us. At the end of the day, at the end of the day, Black people are poorer than we’ve been in sixty years. Under Black management of the city. Under Black management of the city, the economic and racial inequality is worse than we’ve ever seen it. The future for Black young people is bleeding in a casino economy. A casino economy where everything is determined by how well Wall Street is doing, not how well Main Street is doing. Where young people are fed a nihilistic function that lets them know that you are disposable. They call, not the millennial, the generation after the millennials, the zero generation. There is no hope in the existing system and especially for young Black people who live in poor neighborhoods who have names that are easily identifiable as Black. You understand what I’m saying? Study after study shows that if you fill out an application, you’ve got a name that sounds Black, like Tyrone, Nakisha, and you come from a zip code that is known to be Black, they will tear your application up. You damn near have to have a college degree to work at McDonald’s now. So what we have is an expanding lumpen proletariat. Go up into North Philly, Strawberry Mansion. Go around Temple. There’s a low-level war between Temple and the unemployed, Black people. Every day, if you’re a Temple student or employee, you get on your cell phone, there’s another alert, somebody been robbed. The profile is a young, Black man with a hoodie. 

But you’re just going to push my face into it. Yeah. I’m not going to only come in and take over your neighborhood and your schools and turn them into fields for practice for our students and say to you, well, maybe you will learn to play soccer one day as we close down William Penn High School, after the community had been told by Superintendent Ackerman that we’re going to keep it open for the community. You think Black people are just going to sit back and be humiliated like that? And I’ll tell you, there are not enough police in this city or anywhere else to hold back the tide of resistance every day. 

Let me end on this. We are at a moment of truth in this country. Believe your eyes and your ears and what you’re told by your friends, family and neighbors. Don’t go by what the Philadelphia Inquirer says. Believe what you’re seeing. It is bad. Cannot get any better. Some people say the answer is to vote. Maybe it was the answer before the two parties were taken over by the billionaire class. You have a choice between one or the other billionaire candidate. That doesn’t mean the person has to be a billionaire. All it means is they represent the interests of the billionaires and the war makers. We’re told that we’re safer now than we’ve ever been because we have drones that can target our enemies all over the world and that we are fighting terrorism in Syria, in Libya, in Iraq and at home. So we’re safe. Trillion dollar a year military budget. A big part of it goes to the National Security Agency. You know we’re all being spied upon, right? Everybody is considered a potential terrorist. We’re all being spied upon. This huge system of repression and control of the people alongside an economy that only produces for the one percent that is destroying the working class and the middle class, whatever that middle class thing means today, it’s that your pension is not safe, your job is not safe. There’s nothing in your life that is safe from the billionaires. And their idea is, don’t worry, give us the money and as we make money, we will trickle it down to you. There was a great collapse of the financial system in 2008. Mark my word, we’re on the verge of another collapse. 

This is a moment of truth. The American war makers who think they should control the world and the resources of the world have to now decide. Syria will be the turning point. The real war against terror has begun. It is now clear that ISIL and Al Qaeda and all the so-called terrorist organizations were really created by the United States. It’s quite interesting. And for that reason, we as a nation have no interest in defeating them. Because we wanted to use them against the legitimate government of Syria in the same way that we used them against the legitimate government in Libya. So it is a fraud. We went to war in Vietnam based upon a lie. Now we are embroiled in a widening war in the Middle East based upon lies. But the combination, the growing impoverishment of the people in the United States and, by the way, in England and in Spain, in Greece, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in Haiti, in Puerto Rico, all over the world. Impoverishment. This alongside of the fact that the world is saying, from South Africa to Iran, from China and Russia to Greece, enough is enough. No single nation can control all of the people of the world. And once people say that, things begin to change. And so, as we fight here, let us remember our great martyrs. They’re more than heroes. They are martyrs. And most of our great heroes have been martyrs. Among the greatest of them is Mamie Till-Mobley and her son, Emmett Louis Till. And Mamie Till said at the end of the day that God came to her and said that this was my plan for your son. Your son was to be sacrificed so that Black people could see clearly and be able to fight for their future. Thank you very much.