The river site, 63 years later

August 28, 2018 12:31 PM

The first sign, pointing us off the asphalt and down the dirt road, is riddled with bullet holes. We knew to expect this, but it’s still shocking. A spray of perforations, haphazard and angry. One took out the last letter in body. One hit just above the a in black. One pierced right between the first and last names, severing Emmett from Till. This is where it ended, somewhere near here on unincorporated land in Tallahatchie County, a few miles north of the village of Glendora, Mississippi. Siddhartha Mitter on Emmett Till for Popula.
posted by ChuraChura (18 comments total)

I was saying to another Mississippi expat that white women need to volunteer to sit in front of that sign 24/7, in shifts. One of them would still get shot eventually, of course, but she would also get an outcry and justice.

Of course, it costs me nothing to say that. I left, and so did my friend. (I recently read an article with the audacity to ask why Mississippi had the worst brain drain in the country. Christ alive.)
posted by Countess Elena at 12:44 PM on August 28, 2018 [11 favorites]

The next sign they put up should be constructed with a special material that ricochets bullets right back at the shooter.
posted by GoblinHoney at 1:07 PM on August 28, 2018 [8 favorites]

The next sign they put up should be constructed with a special material that ricochets bullets right back at the shooter.

Well, it's already shot up again per this follow up link. Not to mention the fact that even stone edifices or solid steel signs would still be mangled by bullets, even ones that didn't blast through, such that they'd have... character, I guess... pretty quickly.

I started to say that they should put up a sub-sign that says "For every bullet hole in this sign the county is mandated to donate $10 to the NAACP general fund." Pretty soon you'd have bona fide KKK members chaining themselves up out there with logging chains to protect said sign from vandals (read: formerly themselves).

sigh

From that follow up link: Not long after installing a second sign in 2013, the sign was riddled with bullets.

Tell said he believes it is best to leave the sign, rather than replace it.

“The bullet holes bear eloquent witness to the fact that work remains to be done,” he said, “that the memory of Till’s murder still cuts a rift through the heart of the modern day Delta.”

Alvin Sykes, president of the Emmett Till Justice Campaign, agreed that the sign should remain as it is.

"The sign going back up is a sign of progress," he said. "The bullets are showing how much further we need to go."

Growing up in Alabama, not far from Mississippi, I don't know what the answer is, at least in this case I mean, replace vs leave up (which is what those folks concerned seem to be advocating-cum-resigning-for). How much further we need to go indeed.
posted by RolandOfEld at 1:16 PM on August 28, 2018 [10 favorites]

Every time the sign gets shot up, leave the first sign and put up an even bigger new sign.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:20 PM on August 28, 2018 [10 favorites]

OK, so I know this isn't really an engineering problem, but 1/2 inch thick AR500 steel plate will do the trick (and relatively cheaply). But the bullet fragments will strip off whatever text you stick on it.
posted by ryanrs at 1:21 PM on August 28, 2018 [3 favorites]

Re: AR500, plasma-cut the letters (stencil style), put a colored sheet behind it. Visible, just gotta replace the colored sheet every now and then.

...what can I say, it is nice to imagine engineering a solution that'll teach those fuckers a lesson, except of course the local authorities would never allow a functional solution and the fuckers involved are not capable of learning any lessons so it's all moot anyway.
posted by aramaic at 1:43 PM on August 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

(as long as we're fantasizing, the sign should use a tiling of corner reflectors.)
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 1:57 PM on August 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

Instead of replacing the sign, I'd love to see the bullet holes labeled with the date they were made. That way, when some chucklehead says "Oh, that was a long time ago, that was the Old Mississippi" anyone can point out all the holes made by the New Mississippi.

It's sad that replacing the sign once a year would serve the same purpose.
posted by Marky at 2:27 PM on August 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

Put surveillance cameras triggered by the sound of a bullet hitting the sign out there, harvest license plate numbers, and then see where else those cars, trucks, and the people who own them show up over the next few years.
posted by jamjam at 2:57 PM on August 28, 2018 [9 favorites]

could I suggest that elaborate discussions of making the sign impervious to bullets etc. might miss the point of this?
posted by ChuraChura at 3:07 PM on August 28, 2018 [26 favorites]

The FPP article: "I notice a small camera keeping watch, mounted on a tree."
The link within that, to the Clarion Ledger article, "Just 35 days after being replaced, Emmett Till sign hit with bullets," doesn't mention a camera.

The town Emmett Till was visiting, Money, has less than a hundred residents today; Tallahatchie county has a population of 15K. I don't think it's a matter of not knowing who the culprits are, unfortunately.
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:11 PM on August 28, 2018 [7 favorites]

"For every bullet hole in this sign the county is mandated to donate $10 to the NAACP general fund."

This is a BRILLIANT idea!
posted by BlueHorse at 6:34 PM on August 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

ryanrs: "OK, so I know this isn't really an engineering problem, but 1/2 inch thick AR500 steel plate will do the trick (and relatively cheaply). But the bullet fragments will strip off whatever text you stick on it."

EDM the letters right thru the plate (like a stencil). But make it too tough and people will just steal it or damage it with torches/grinders.
posted by Mitheral at 7:23 PM on August 28, 2018

They are still trying to find new ways to desecrate his body.

.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 11:24 PM on August 28, 2018 [4 favorites]

Exactly. Per that Clarion Ledger article:

Six months after the commission installed the first sign, it disappeared. Dave Tell, author of the upcoming book, “Remembering Emmett Till,” said tire tracks leading from the site to the riverbank led Sheriff William Brewer to conclude that the sign had been tossed into the Tallahatchie River, just as Till’s body was — “an irony not lost on the local black community.”
posted by Iris Gambol at 11:49 PM on August 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

I try to remember to reread the story of Emmett Till once every year or so; it just seems important. Even more so in these last few years.

It's too bad there isn't some realistic way they could enact renaming the whole county after him. In my 'imaginary better world' it would be a chance, at least, of then working to grow something positive out of it from there. As even the article points out, young Mr. Till's story is far from the only tragic tale of that (or the modern) era. Still, it'd be a good start, and a guy's gotta dream I guess.
posted by BigHeartedGuy at 11:50 PM on August 28, 2018 [2 favorites]

> It's too bad there isn't some realistic way they could enact renaming the whole county after him. In my 'imaginary better world' it would be a chance, at least, of then working to grow something positive out of it from there.

My idea was similar, though more extreme and more cynical (and impossible.) Name the road, the schools, the municipal buildings, the parks, an everything else in the county after him, and stencil the image of that historic marker on every damn surface including windows, the backs of highway signs, utility poles. Will the racist fuckers literally rip the county apart in their determination to desecrate Emmett Till?
posted by desuetude at 10:00 AM on August 29, 2018 [3 favorites]

Turns out 1/2 inch AR500 is not really immune to bullets--just much more resistant. If you hit it at the edge (and if you cut lettering through it there will be a lot of edges), it will chew off a little bit.

I don't see a good affordable way to protect such a sign on a deserted stretch of road. It's one of those asymmetric situations where it costs way more to stop your opponent than it costs them. I think I'd just budget to replace it every year and view the holes as representative of the struggle.
posted by Gilgamesh's Chauffeur at 6:23 PM on September 7, 2018 [1 favorite]