Tue. 29 Mar MMXVI |
"How Do You Tell The Story Of Black America In One Museum?"
A grade-school level Google search will reveal that the museum is spending approximately 8.5% of its >$1B budget telling the story of Emmett Till.
For many black Americans, Emmett Till was / is the "black martyr who jump-started the Civil Rights Movement," even before the besainted Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.
Here's where it gets really interesting, though:
Emmett Till's father, Louis, was a violent criminal who as a conscripted man wound up raping at least two Italian women and murdering a third. Till Senior was executed by the US Army in Summer 1945, one of about 100 US soldiers executed by the Army during WW2 for violent acts against local populations in the conflict.
Another famous individual executed by the U.S. Army was Eddie Slovik - a Dearborn Michigan 22 year-old with a troubled past, who after becoming shell-shocked in an artillery raid in France in Autumn 1944, deserted his unit and was later executed by firing squad for this desertion. Eddie Slovik was the first US soldier to be executed for desertion since the Civil War.
In 1974 Martin Sheen and Gary Busey starred in the made-for-tv film about Slovik's life and death. It's called "The Execution Of Eddie Slovic," it's two hours long, and you should be able to watch it here :
Slovic and Emmett Till senior were buried in the same plot of land in France after their respective executions. Even though one soldier was a violently pathological rapist and murderer, and the other was just a scared sole who thought his confession to desertion would result in nothing worse than time in the brig until the war's end.
So I guess the Big Question is : can we expect the Washington D.C. Museum of African American History and Culture to include in their Emmett Till exhibit, a mention of poor Eddie Slovik, who lay side by side with Emmett Till Senior in the damp dirt of France for decades (until Slovik's widow finally managed to have his remains re-interred in Dearborn).
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Please contact the soon-to-open Museum, and ask the director yourself : "We know your Emmett Till "lynching" exhibit cost tens of millions of dollars to produce : do you plan on telling the story of Emmett Till Sr.?".