We are in the year 2025. Yet, in classrooms across America, students open history books where pages on race and justice have been blacked out or pulled from shelves. In polling places, election workers sit behind plexiglass shields, bracing for threats. And in Mississippi, where a 14-year-old boy faced a beating so intense that it sparked a shift in civil-rights history, the question lingers: Have we truly learned from Emmett Till’s story?
On Aug. 28, 1955, Mississippi men lynched Emmett Till in the town of Money after Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, accused him of whistling at her. His mutilated body was shipped back to Chicago, where his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, made a decision that changed America: She insisted on an open casket, declaring, “Let the world see what they did to my boy.”
The photographs published in Jet magazine forced a nation to confront the brutality of racism, and his death became a catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. Seventy years later, the echoes are still loud.
In 2022, after more than 200 failed attempts over a century, Congress finally passed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, signed into law on March 29, 2022, making lynching a federal hate crime. In 2023, President Biden designated the Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument across sites in Illinois and Mississippi. These are not just markers of history; they are living reminders of how fragile justice remains.
Yet, while we honor Till, we also find ourselves in a dangerous cycle of erasure. Across the country, books about race, gender and sexuality are being stripped from classrooms and libraries.
PEN America writes that the 2024-2025 school year saw a surge in bans, with Florida leading the charge in removing titles that discuss racism, civil rights or LGBTQ+ lives. When history is silenced, so, too, is the possibility of progress. The very lessons Mamie Till wanted the world to see are being hidden from a new generation.
This erasure is paired with attacks on democracy itself. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court let stand a lower court’s ruling requiring Alabama to redraw its racially gerrymandered maps.
The ACLU called it a victory for Black voters, but the fight is far from over. Across states, legislators are still manipulating district lines to dilute minority power. What Mamie exposed in 1955—the systematic devaluing of Black life—persists in today’s efforts to devalue Black votes.
The threats extend beyond maps. Election workers, the very people who safeguard our democratic process, face rising intimidation and harassment. The Brennan Center for Justice has documented how fear is driving experienced workers out, leaving our elections vulnerable.
This climate is not abstract: It recalls the same terror that silenced voices in Emmett Till’s Mississippi, where violence was the price for participation.
And yet, in the face of this, people continue to rise. The Emmett Till Interpretive Center is marking this 70th anniversary with calls for remembrance and education. Community leaders are demanding inclusive curricula. Voting-rights advocates are working tirelessly to ensure every ballot counts. These acts of resistance carry the same spirit of Mamie Till-Mobley: courage in the face of fear, truth in the face of lies.
The lesson of Emmett Till is not simply about looking back: It is about looking in the mirror. Do we see a democracy strong enough to hold truth, or one fragile enough to shatter under fear? Do we raise children who know the full story of America, or ones handed a sanitized version that denies their power?
We must read the books others want banned; visit the Till National Monument and stand where history demands remembrance; demand fair maps and defend voting rights in every state; and protect the election workers who protect our democracy.
Seventy years after Mamie Till-Mobley’s act of courage, we face our own test. Will we look away, or will we look clearly at the truth and act? The open casket of 1955 was not meant to be a closed chapter. It was a mirror held up to a nation. Today, it still is.
America, the charge is clear: Let us not turn from the mirror—let us live up to it.
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