Devin Allen acknowledges that he sometimes behaved like a knucklehead as a child growing up in Baltimore. But he was not so irreverent as a tenth grader that he could see an image of Emmett Till’s open casket and not find it arresting.
Mamie Till-Mobley asked a photographer to capture Emmett’s funeral. This made the story of the 14 year-old Black boy who was lynched by Mississippi police officers well-known. The 1955 photos, which were horrifying in their detail, showed how violent racial hatred was pervading the U.S. and catalyzed civil rights movements.
“Back then, I was like, ‘Wow, that happened so long ago. It would never happen now,’” Allen said, recalling the first time a high school history teacher showed him the images.
Allen would then capture the fervent images of protests and civil unrest in Baltimore, 10 years later, after the 2015 murder of Freddie Gray, a Black male who was taken into police custody. Allen’s black-and-white photo of a protester running away from a line charging police officers was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2015. It is now part of the Smithsonian collection.
Allen’s photographs highlighting the effects of police brutality on Baltimore’s Black community are part of the new “Impact of Images” campaign, inspired by the power of photographs like the ones of Emmett printed nearly 70 years ago in Jet magazine. The exhibit, curated by Lead With Love, is in collaboration with the studio and production company behind the biopic “Till,” which goes into wide release Friday.
The collection contains the most acclaimed work of Black photographers, photojournalists and photographers from civil rights and post-civil right eras like Ernest Withers, Kwame Bradwaite, Gordon Parks and Kwame Brathwaite. There is also work from Black Lives Matter photographers. It will open to the public Saturday at Atlanta’s ZuCot Gallery, a Black-owned gallery.
“When I became a photographer, I started understanding,” Allen said. “I’m nothing but a conduit, doing something that has been passed down from generation to generation. We are truthful disclosers. We are storytellers. We are light bringers.”
Another featured photographer, Noémie Tshinanga, took up photography as a young teenager. Her professional work focuses on showing Black people without suffering grief, pain, or anguish.
“It doesn’t matter who you are, whether you’re a notable figure or someone walking down the street like, your existence is enough,” the Brooklyn-based photographer said. “That is the importance of showing that flip side of just us being.”
The collection includes Tshinanga’s regal portrait of the late, pioneering Black actress Cicely Tyson. There’s also a photograph of a Black man on a beach, eyes shut and head tilted as though he is taking in a healing breath of sea breeze.
Tshinanga was a teenager when she first saw Emmett’s open casket. Like Allen, she didn’t fully grasp its continued relevance until one of her generation’s versions was splashed across social media in 2014.
“I remember Mike Brown’s photo and just like everyone trying to figure out what was happening and just kind of processing that,” she said, referring to an image of the lifeless body of Michael Brown, left for hours in the middle of the street after the Black 18-year-old was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.
“And so once that image was ingrained in my head, it made me understand Emmett Till’s image,” she said.
Till-Mobley sent her son to Chicago in the summer 1955 to visit her family in Mississippi. Emmett was warned by Till-Mobley that he would be heading to a place where his safety and security depended on his ability not to speak up about his uncompromising, outgoing nature in front of white people.
In the overnight hours of Aug. 28, Emmett was taken from his uncle’s home at gunpoint by two vengeful white men. Emmett’s alleged crime? Flirting in the arms of one his killers.
Three days later, a fisherman on the Tallahatchie River discovered the teenager’s bloated corpse. His eye was broken, his ear was missing, and his head was shot.
“They would not be able to visualize what had happened, unless they were allowed to see the result of what had happened. They had to see what I had seen,” Till-Mobley said in a 2003 memoir. “The whole nation had to bear witness.”
Till-Mobley handpicked Jet photographer David Jackson, a Black man who had spent much of his career documenting the horrors of Jim Crow segregation in the South, to take the controversial images of her son’s body at a funeral home in Chicago.
The vast majority of U.S. news outlets worried that they would drive away readers and advertisers if they printed graphic images of the teenager’s body — but not publishers in the Black press. John H. Johnson (the late founder of Jet and Ebony) bravely revealed what happened to Emmett.
“(Johnson) said, ‘If his mother asked me to do it, I was gonna do it no matter what,’” said Margena Christian, a senior lecturer at the University of Illinois at Chicago and former editor and writer at Jet and Ebony. Johnson was her colleague for 10 years, and would sometimes recount his thoughts on Jet’s coverage.
Jet discontinued its print edition in 2014, but president Daylon Goff said the now-digital brand continues to promote its legacy as the outlet that fearlessly told Emmett’s story.
The images of the teenager’s open casket are a turning point in the plot of “Till,” the first-ever feature-length retelling of the atrocity and Till-Mobley’s pursuit of justice. In her research for the film, director Chinonye Chukwu learned that Till-Mobley was “very intentional” in how she shared the story of her son’s murder with the world.
“It was no accident that she chose a Black photographer for the photo,” Chukwu told The Associated Press. “She knew what she was doing and she knew the importance of us telling our own story.”
Reggie Cunningham, another featured “Impact of Images” photographer, began taking photos during the Ferguson uprising over Brown’s death. While his photos often showed violence and pain between residents and police officers, he also captured joy and a sense that St. Louis was a part of a larger community.
He documented their relationship years later, after Brittany Packnett Cunningham, his wife and another prominent voice in the Ferguson protests, had given birth to their son prematurely. These black-and-white photographs are part of the image gallery.
“It was about how much she loves him and the joy that she brings him in her motherhood,” Cunningham said. “That is the story that I really wanted to tell.”
These are the images he wants his son accustomed to seeing as he grows up, Cunningham said: “In my work, I seek to tell these stories and spread awareness of the full expanse of Blackness, in an effort to create an affinity for our experience.”
Brothers and ZuCot Gallery managing partners Onaje and Omari Henderson said people coming to see the exhibit won’t feel like they are “going into a repast after a funeral.” Instead, they said, visitors will see a showcase of resiliency.
The collection — which can be viewed every Saturday and by appointment on weekdays until Nov. 13 — also includes personal photos from the Till family, stills from the movie, and images from Ebony and Jet.
The Atlanta exhibit will be joined by a mural that bears the likenesses Emmett & Mamie Till-Mobley at The Beehive. This is a Black-owned space located in South Los Angeles. New Orleans-based artist Brandan “BMike” Odums, whose artwork was recently featured on the cover of actor Will Smith’s autobiography, dedicated the mural alongside artist Whitney Alix last weekend.
Before completing the mural, Odums told the AP Till-Mobley’s courage in telling her son’s story through arresting photographs anchors him in his mission as an artist.
“That’s what the power of our images, the power of our voice does,” he said. “It ripples into spaces and rooms where people might not be ready to have the conversation. But the ripples go far and wide.”
Aaron Morrison is a New York City-based member of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.
