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.
