Opinion | Put the Vandalized Emmett Till Signs in Museums

It’s becoming something of a cycle. Every time a new sign is erected to mark the spot where, in 1955, Emmett Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River in Mississippi, the sign gets vandalized, it gets replaced and it gets vandalized again. And replaced again.
The riverbank has also become a pilgrimage site, not just for civil rights tourists, but also for vandals, for the University of Mississippi fraternity brothers who posed in front of it with rifles, and, most recently, for a neo-Confederate hate group.
While the cycle of violence has produced a succession of ever-more-pristine signs, we must not forget the three damaged originals, one of which has been lost. They convey the truth of Till’s murder more completely than the pristine signs ever could because they refuse us the comfort of believing that racism is a thing of the past. That’s why those signs belong in a museum.

Jerome Little had no patience for the destruction of the signs. After the first sign was stolen in 2008, the founder of the Emmett Till Memorial Commission told the local newspaper: “I want to make sure that whoever did this knows that this sign is going back up. Every time it’s taken down, it’s going back up.” Although Mr. Little passed away in 2011, his penchant for replacing vandalized signs has become the commission’s default practice. The bulletproof sign for which I wrote the inscription, dedicated in October, perfectly captures Mr. Little’s dream: a sign the sheer strength of which would keep it forever intact. Built with a half-inch of AR500 steel and covered by a 0.75-inch replaceable polycarbonate plate, we believe the sign will never again be pierced by bullets.

Much like Mr. Little and members of the commission, I understand the racist violence against the sign as a proxy for racist violence against humans. As I wrote in The Chicago Tribune, because the vandalism turned markers of the black experience into reminders of white supremacy, it is a form of terrorism. And I agree with Airickca Gordon-Taylor, Till’s cousin, that such terror must not go unanswered. If preserving Till’s story with dignity for the next generation requires hardened steel, so be it.

But we must not forget the earlier signs. Vandalized, they have even greater commemorative power. The bullet holes that fill these signs are simple, affectively charged reminders that we have not yet put behind us the racism that cost Till his life. From my experience as a scholar of Till commemoration, my dearest conviction is that the story of the 14-year-old’s lynching must not be confined to 1955. It is a story whose relevance grows more pressing with each passing year. And, while the new .50-inch steel of the bulletproof sign is an appropriate medium on which to secure Till’s story, the old bullet-pierced aluminum reminds us that the past is never entirely in the past.
The novelist Ralph Ellison captured the power of vandalized commemoration with particular grace. His fictional account of the real statue of Booker T. Washington on the campus of Tuskegee University is a moving testament to the ways that vandalism expands the power of commemoration:

In my mind’s eye, I see the bronze statue of the college founder … his arms outstretched in the breathtaking gesture of lifting a veil that flutters in hard, metallic folds above the face of a kneeling slave; and I am standing puzzled, unable to decide whether the veil is really being lifted, or lowered more firmly in place; whether I am witnessing a revelation or a more efficient blinding. And as I gaze, there is a rustle of wings and I see a flock of starlings flighting before me and, when I look again, the bronze face, whose empty eyes look upon a world I have never seen, runs with liquid chalk — creating another ambiguity to puzzle my groping mind: “Why is a bird-soiled statue more commanding than one that is clean?"
While the clean statue is a straightforward monument to liberation, the whitened, bird-soiled version also pointed to the continuing oppression. Soiled, the statue captured both the promise of liberation and its continuing deferral. The defaced statue was the only honest account.

In the case of the Emmett Till signs, the bullet holes provide a real-life parallel to Ellison’s soiled statue. They offer us an account of the lynching in which the racism of 1955 lingers still in the 21st century.
The bullet-pierced markers belong in a museum. It is good that the signs have been taken down because markers of terror should not stand unattended, inflicting trauma on passers-by. But we must not lose the lessons they hold. Preserved, displayed and contextualized, that message of terror could be transformed into an object lesson in the tenacity of hate and the ever-more-urgent relevance of Till’s story.