![]() ![]() Ralph Abernathy (rear) and Martin Luther King lead the way on the road to Montgomery in 1965. However, Baldwin’s words give us some insight into the pain of being considered hypersexualised and dangerous by the same world that killed Till and Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin. While we know the name Emmett Till because of photos of his open casket (which his mother, Mamie Till, insisted upon), his voice was silenced. ![]() ![]() Reading that made me reassess the fact that Carolyn Bryant – the woman who accused Emmett Till of whistling at her, triggered his lynching, helped his murderers go free and recently admitted that she lied – will not face punishment. Baldwin’s words, too, channel both a love of black people and an urge to document white violence: “When I was 10,” he writes, “two policemen amused themselves with me by frisking me, making comic (and terrifying) speculations concerning my ancestry and probable sexual prowess, and for good measure, leaving me flat on my back in one of Harlem’s empty lots.” However much love and sympathy Schapiro may have for his subjects’ black faces, his images are often of horrific violence: bombed houses, bombed cars, bullet holes, search parties looking for missing people who would all too often turn up dead. ![]()
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