JFBelieve – Hard Images that Teach Us

  CAUTIONARY TALE

 

Emmett Till was a 14 year-old African-American boy who was accused of staring or whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955.  For this, he was abducted by 2 white men, beaten, tortured, mutilated, shot and then thrown in the river.  When his boated body washed up the next day, his mother had the gumption and courage to hold an open-casket funeral service for her boy, that tens of thousands attended, to show the effects of racism.  The men who killed him went on to be acquitted of the crime, despite multiple witnesses and their own hubris in bragging about it.

That white woman involve later confessed, on her death bed, that Emmett had not done what she accused him of, and that she was pressured to lie.  An unspeakable tragedy that Emmett’s mother turned into an opportunity to not only expose the barbarism of American racism but also the corruption of the judicial system and limitations of American democracy at large.

When my clock radio went off this morning at 6 AM, the newscaster was saying that today is the night each year that has the most drinking and driving-related deaths.

I ask that if you are anywhere tonight where you see someone considering driving who shouldn’t be, please show them the pictures bellow.  We are a visual society and sometimes a picture has more impact that a well-reasoned argument.  This is the effects of impaired driving.  If it can save one life tonight it will have been worth it.

Have a safe New Year, Friends.