"Published to mark the 70th anniversary of Emmett Till's death, Open Casket is a potent reminder that bearing witness to the horrors of white supremacy is a historically rooted collective grieving process that has particular resonances for Black people - and anyone with a moral conscience. Each essay upends the attempted erasure of the horrors wrought on a Black 14-year-old child by white adult men and the system designed to protect them."
"This book attests that for Black people living in an anti-Black society, our mourning and mournability are part of our story, but they are not the full story. Readers are invited to bear witness and tarry with Mamie Till-Mobley as she rejects suggestions to keep her only child's funeral private and hidden from public view. Her act of Black maternal resistance connects us to the slave ship and bridges the gap between 1955 Jim Crow Mississippi and today."
Open Casket centers Mamie Till-Mobley’s decision to hold an open casket and invites collective witnessing of Emmett Till’s lynching. The anthology’s essays reject erasure of the violence inflicted by white men and legal systems. Contributors interrogate victimhood, Black maternal militancy, the politics of refusal, and Black agency. The volume situates Black mourning within a historical continuum of anti-Black violence, from the slave ship through Jim Crow to the present. The work portrays public grieving as an act of resistance and moral testimony, and emphasizes that mourning and mournability are part of Black life but not its totality.
#emmett-till #mamie-till-mobley #black-maternal-resistance #collective-mourning #anti-black-violence
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