14

Politicize Grief

Privatizing disaster is common. Sometimes, we want to flee politics because it’s just so overwhelming. That’s why, in September 2020, Democratic vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris was commended when she took time out of her hectic campaign schedule to go to Milwaukee. Behind closed doors, with no media present, Harris met with the family of the twenty-nine-year-old Black man, Jacob Blake. Blake was paralyzed by white police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, who shot him seven times in the back at point-blank range as he reached into the dashboard of his parked car. As Harris told reporters later, she simply wanted to “express concern for their well-being and of course, for their brother and their son’s well-being and to let them know that they have support.”¹

Deep within your heart, you agree with Harris’s motives. You want to empathize with victims of police violence, to say how sorry you feel for what they’re going through. To grieve with them. But some disasters aren’t entirely personal. The reason we hear about them in the first place is because they’re not unique. We know that they’re part of a broader pattern. The shooting of Jacob Blake was one of hundreds of instances in which Black people are shot by police every year in the US. So, make tragedy unforgettable for those who want to move on. Make collective action defeat individual apathy. Grieve politically.

The clearest expression of this is seen in the life of Mamie Till-Mobley. You may not know her story, but she’s one of the heroes in US history. Her fourteen-year-old Black son, Emmett, was visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, in August 1955 when he was lynched by two white supremacists. On a hot summer afternoon, Emmett was falsely accused of whistling at a white woman, Carolyn Bryant, who owned a grocery store. Emmett’s body, bruised and beaten, pierced with a bullet and a seventy-pound cotton gin tied around his neck as an anchor, was later found deep in the Tallahatchie River. Local white officials wanted to cover up the murder so they could continue to say that Jim Crow was perfectly civilized. Mamie Till, however, wouldn’t allow them to control the public narrative. She demanded that her boy’s body be flown to his hometown, Chicago, for a public burial. The funeral director, A. A. Raynor, warned her to keep the casket shut, for the sake of not having to relive the trauma. But she demanded that it stay open, saying she would pry it open with her own bare hands. “I was putting him back together again,” Till recalled.²

Mamie politicized her grief. She wasn’t swallowed whole by its overwhelming force. Young Emmett’s brutalized body, she wants the world to see, is proof of what racism does to its innocent victims. Jim Crow isn’t simply about being denied a good seat at the local movie theater. It’s not merely being forced to sit in the back of the bus. Jim Crow is a bloodthirsty, maniacal expression of dehumanization that knows no boundaries. This is the loud message that Mamie shared with the one hundred thousand people who attended the open-casket burial at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago. Many of them fainted and were aided by nurses, who were on call to provide care. Millions more saw a photograph of Emmett’s precious body, destroyed by white terror in the now iconic picture published in Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender. “I was not going quietly,” Till explained. “They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this.”³ Mamie didn’t privatize her pain. Grieving in public, she knew, creates a community to work through grief collectively.

Despite overwhelming evidence pointing to their guilt, the two white men who lynched Emmett were acquitted after an all-white jury deliberated for less than an hour. But Jim Crow justice didn’t win following the “not guilty” verdict. On November 27, 1955, the Black civil rights activist Dr. T. R. M. Howard, remembering Mamie Till’s labor of love, delivered a speech he had given many times over the past months about the details of Emmett’s lynching. In it he gave the names of the white perpetrators and the blow-by-blow details of what was known about the case at that point. That night, Howard spoke at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, whose new pastor was a twenty-six-year-old with a Boston University PhD in theology, Martin Luther King Jr. A forty-two-year-old seamstress was also attending Howard’s speech. Her name was Rosa Parks. Four days later, on December 1, after a long and tiring day of work, she would refuse to sit in the back of a segregated bus, sparking what became 381 days of the Montgomery bus boycott, the most successful freedom struggle in US history. Four months later, Howard spoke to a crowd of three thousand in Chicago, relaying King’s message from the streets of Montgomery, where the battle was well underway. “Tell the folks in Chicago,” King said, “we have enlisted in this fight for the duration.”⁴

Tears help you process what might seem unbearable, but they can also be the source of transformative social work. And this goes well beyond our own feelings. President Barack Obama, known for his public composure, politicized grief in the most positive way when, on June 26, 2015, he gave an impassioned eulogy a week after the Charleston massacre, when a white supremacist murdered nine Black parishioners at an AME church in South Carolina. Speaking at the College of Charleston for one of the murdered, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, Obama poignantly denounced the scourge of racial inequality in the city. Charleston, he declares, is “a place still wracked by poverty and inadequate schools; a place where children can still go hungry and the sick can go without treatment,” and he singled out the “unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation.”⁵ In March 2018, one month after teenagers saw seventeen of their classmates gunned down by another one of their classmates at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, three thousand marched onto the school’s football field in protest. They were part of a nationwide school walkout. That same day, students at Baltimore Polytechnic staged a “lie-in,” where they lay motionless on the ground for seventeen minutes—each minute symbolizing one of the Parkland children murdered. Their goal: gun control. Critics say pray; don’t march. Make a vigil; don’t propose legislation. But the students were in good company. As a Black mother once showed the world, tragedy can be the best time for politics. That’s when the world is watching. Grab their attention.