This is just to say… Thank you.
Thank you to all the strong, weary, defiant women who have been determined enough, angry enough, whatever enough, to say “Enough is enough.”
In September of 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley traveled from Chicago to Mississippi to attend the funeral of her son, Emmett Till, who had been tortured and murdered by two White men. Against the advice of everyone involved, Mamie Till-Mobley insisted on an open casket funeral, telling the press, "I wanted the world to see what they did to my baby." The disturbing photos taken of Emmett Till's mutilated face were distributed throughout the country and around the world.
On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks boarded a bus, sat in the back—in the seating designated for Black folks—but was ordered by the bus driver to stand in order to allow a White man to sit down. She refused and was subsequently arrested.
On May 25, 2020, Darnella Frazier happened upon a scene in which police were attempting to take a man into custody. When the officers had subdued the man but continued to use force against him, she began recording the incident on her cell phone. Later that day, she posted the video on her Facebook page, footage that has now been seen by viewers around the world and which led to the arrest and conviction of Derek Chauvin, the officer who kneeled on the neck of the already subdued George Floyd until his breathing stopped, his heart stopped, and he could not be revived.
I love the image of her standing there on the sidewalk, phone raised, face determined. “The world needed to see what I was seeing,” she said. Yes, honey, we did. Of course we’d seen similar atrocities before, many times, in many ways. But not like this. Not when there could be no discussion of whether it was “a good shoot” or “a bad shoot” or whether the brutality could be justified. What we witnessed this time was a slow public lynching, with the perpetrator’s smug facial expression captured for all the world to see.
Thank you, Darnella, for simply having the humanity to stand there and document what you saw. What was happening “wasn’t right,” just as you said.
Time
and again we wonder, What can one person do to change things? Turns out, one
single person can make sweeping changes simply by caring enough to act.
Such a powerful post. I wish more could read your words. LN
ReplyDeleteThank you for taking the time to leave your comment. You cannot know how much it means to me. I have been discouraged with this post...because so few have read it compared to other posts. (I don't usually obsess on page views, but this post was important to me.) I guess it is easier than we think for some folks to just turn away, turn back to their phones or TVs or Netflix bingeing or whatever. Thank you again for taking time out to read my words and to comment.
DeleteThere's a quote that goes something like, "Everything you do and everything you don't do effects the world." Thank god for the Darnellas and the Rosas and the Mamies for "doing" that effects the world, even incrementally. I can't imagine how scary it was to be a young black woman filming this murder only feet away from this white cop. Such courage to do the right thing... to be the doer. Thank you for saying Darnella's name.
ReplyDeleteI am grateful, my friend, that you saw what I saw in the photo of Darnella standing there, recording--a young woman who had reason to fear, but who was able to set that fear aside to document a wrong-doing. May we all have her courage if, God help us, we are ever in similar circumstances.
Delete