I used to teach high school and thought the first tape of the "Eyes on the Prize" documentary of the Civil Rights Movement which told the story of Emmett Till was such a valuable lesson that I paid $100 for a replacement when the teacher's library I'd been checking it out from closed. Watch it if you can. Till's mother is beautiful and astonishingly brave. So is his uncle, who stood up in a courtroom and identified the two white men who had brazenly taken Till from his bed by gunpoint. The killers and their wives are sickeningly confident they will be acquitted, even though everyone knows they beat and murdered the boy.

Also the Gwendolyn Brooks poem about it is deeply moving. It's one of very few things I kept after 17 years teaching. "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters In Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon." I mistakenly thought "The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till" was part of the same poem and read the two together, with the Last Quatrain last. It read well that way.

Things are a little different now, but not enough. Not by a long shot. Thank god for the brave BLM protestors who are pushing for change.