Death of Innocence

It's the very beginning of the mass movement we came to know as the struggle for legal and social justice in this country. Brown v. Board of Education had just been decided by the Supreme Court and there was massive resistance in the South. African Americans who tried to assert their equal rights following Brown were run out of their homes and forced off their farms through economic reprisals. They were intimidated, beaten and even murdered. This is the world Emmett walked into during the summer of 1955 after begging his mother to travel to the Mississippi Delta to visit relatives. The vacation of a lifetime for a confident, energetic and mischievous boy from Chicago who knew no boundaries in life. The boundaries began to close in on him as soon as he stepped off the train in Mississippi. Emmett's mutilated remains were returned to his mother two weeks later after he had been kidnapped, tortured for hours and finally shot and dumped into the Tallahassee River. A 75-pound gin fan, tied around his neck with barbed wire. His crime: flirting with a white woman. Reportedly on a dare by friends and cousins. His killers thought he would never be seen again. They thought wrong. On the third day, his body rose again. And everything changed. Mother Mobley ordered that the remains be returned to Chicago and then made sure Emmett's body lay in state in an opened casket for four days. Some 100,000 people filed by to consider what can happen when no one is watching. The world would never turn away again.