Wherever you have that, whatever city you have that in, it could be in Washington, it could be in New York, where western speedway drag racing you have murder and crime going on and the people do nothing about it, it’s going to increase and destroy your society. The Schutz painting and the debate around it are already a historical unit, one that seems new to the art world, and one that will change things. Unlike the Styron controversy, it has unfolded on the internet at warp speed with thousands of people arguing about it almost in real time.

• Following Roy Wilkins’ comments, white opinion began to shift.
• Pretty soon, my mother came in there pleading with them not to take Emmett.
• Three days after arriving in Money, Mississippi, on August 24, 1955, Emmett Till and a group of teenagers entered Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy refreshments after a long day picking cotton in the hot afternoon sun.
• Cartoon in Le Figaro, French newspaper, entitled “Le Droit De Vivre” commenting on the Emmett Till racially motivated murder in Mississippi in 1955,…

But it is necessary because artwork can spark conversations that need to be had. I believe she painted Emmett Till in her perspective as a White woman. However it was not deep enough to understand the Black perspective. If her painting, and my painting were side by side, the difference contrast between what a Black woman would see and paint, versus what a White woman would see and paint in the interpretation of Emmett Till’s death/body would be immense.

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“That was shocking and exciting, and it made life after school less difficult. I’d thought maybe I’d be a tour guide, because that was my job at Columbia, even though I have a terrible speaking voice and no one could hear me. I was really lucky, because now I had enough money to rent a studio.” Interest in her work spread rapidly after that—she was in the Venice Biennale in 2003 and the second Greater New York show, in 2005. In 1996, documentary filmmaker Keith Beauchamp, who was greatly moved by Till’s open-casket photograph, started background research for a feature film he planned to make about Till’s murder. He asserted that as many as 14 people may have been involved, including Carolyn Bryant Donham .

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Emmett, who was from Chicago, was visiting relatives in Mississippi when a white woman falsely accused him of whistling at her and attempting to grab her hand and waist while inside a grocery store. Following a murder trial, an all-white jury acquitted the men. Months later, they admitted to their crimes in a magazine interview. Donham told her husband, Roy Bryant, about the alleged encounter. Enraged that a black boy allegedly came on to his white wife, Bryant and his half-brother John William Milam kidnapped the young teen from his great-uncle’s house two nights later and subsequently beat him, shot him and tossed his body in a river.

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Following Roy Wilkins’ comments, white opinion began to shift. According to historian Stephen J. Whitfield, a specific brand of xenophobia in the South was particularly strong in Mississippi. Whites were urged to reject the influence of Northern opinion and agitation. This independent attitude was profound enough in Tallahatchie County that it earned the nickname “The Freestate of Tallahatchie”, according to a former sheriff, “because people here do what they damn well please”, making the county often difficult to govern. They tied up Till in the back of a green pickup truck and drove toward Money, Mississippi.

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The 2002 book Mississippi Trials, 1955 is a fictionalized account of Till’s death. The 2015 song by Janelle Monáe “Hell You Talmbout” invokes the names of African-American people – including Emmett Till – who died as a result of encounters with law enforcement or racial violence. In 2016 artist Dana Schutz painted Open Casket, a work based on photographs of Till in his coffin as well as on an account by Till’s mother of seeing him after his death. Till’s body was returned to Chicago where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket, which was held at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and images of his mutilated body were published in black-oriented magazines and newspapers, rallying popular black support and white sympathy across the U.S. Intense scrutiny was brought to bear on the lack of black civil rights in Mississippi, with newspapers around the U.S. critical of the state.

My mother, a Cuban immigrant, arrived in New York shortly before Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. She was not physically present at his funeral, but saw pictures of him in the casket and learned about his death from the news. She was so appalled by the violence that she never got over it. She talked to me about the Till case throughout my childhood and refused to let me or my brothers visit the Deep South. She was a pathologist who performed hundreds of autopsies, but the image of a disfigured Emmett Till in the casket left an indelible mark on her memory as the archetypal representation of American racism. I want to ask Ms. Shultz, is there nothing that as a white woman that she would want to say?