CULTURE

This Week's Culture Headlines:

The murder of Emmett Louis Till, revisited

Row over painting leads to stomach vs. soul debate in Philippines

The murder of Emmett Louis Till, revisited

By Brent Staples

A crucial difference between the Old South and the New South has to do with public attitudes toward murder and lynching. In the pre-civil-rights South, white men in the more rural communities were more likely to be punished for misdemeanors than for killing a black man, even in plain public view. Lynchers were rarely brought to trial. Those whom the system could rouse itself to indict were exonerated by all-white juries. Black witnesses to these crimes often avoided the courtroom, fearful that testifying against a white man would bring their lives to an end.

The Ku Klux Klan bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL, in 1963 was a pivotal case. The killing of four little girls attending Sunday school outraged the international community and forced decent Alabamians to get down off the fence. Thanks in part to foot-dragging by J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, it would take nearly 40 years for the courts to convict the surviving bombers. The last of them, the elderly Bobby Frank Cherry, was convicted of murder just six months ago.

Witnesses who initially kept quiet in the Birmingham case eventually came forward to tell the truth. The same process could conceivably play out in the case of Emmett Louis Till, a 14-year-old black Chicagoan who was kidnapped, mutilated and brutally murdered while visiting relatives in Mississippi in 1955.

Two men, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, were acquitted of the murder, even though they admitted to a sheriff and his deputy that they had abducted the boy. The acquittal sparked demonstrations across the country and gave an urgency to the civil rights movement in the South. But the killers and their collaborators were never brought to justice.

A new documentary by 31-year-old Keith Beauchamp could well cause this case to be reopened. There will be a private screening of the film, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till, on Nov. 16 at the New York University Cantor Film Center. A discussion by experts will follow. Beauchamp, who grew up in Louisiana, was 10 or 11 when he came across a picture of Emmett’s mutilated body in Jet magazine. Faced with a curious child, Beauchamp’s mother and father delicately explained the inconceivable.

Beauchamp grew up obsessed with this case and has spent more than six years of his young life tracking down and filming witnesses, some of whom had never spoken for the public record. At the time of the trial, Tallahatchie County was two-thirds black, but not a single black name could be found on county voting rolls or in the jury pool. Two black men who were agitating for voting rights had already been killed when Emmett Till arrived to visit his relatives.

Some of the fear that ruled black life in Mississippi 50 years ago still hovers in the air. One local man, trying to prevent Beauchamp from filming, told him that he was putting people in danger because “the people who did this killing still live around here.” Two witnesses asked to be filmed in silhouette, out of fear that they might be hurt or killed for talking. One of them, just a child in 1955, recalled seeing two black men washing blood from a pickup truck similar to the one used in the abduction. When asked where the blood had come from, the men said that they had been deer hunting.

According to the witness, one of the men washing away blood was Henry Lee Loggins, an occasional employee of Milam, one of the two men tried. A man identified in the film as Loggins denies that he had anything to do with the killing. But Mississippi officials and the United States Justice Department should be interested in his claim that the local sheriff falsely arrested and jailed him for six months, around the time of the trial. For years, watchers of this case believed that Loggins was dead and that he had been jailed at the time of the trial to prevent his being called as a witness. This also kept him away from civil rights investigators and the newspaper reporters who swamped the county.

The grounding personality in this film is Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley. Mobley has lived half a century with the knowledge that the legal system in Mississippi conspired to disregard her son’s murder and let the killers go. Her descriptions of the angry crowd that greeted her at the courthouse door and the attempt by state officials to dispose of Emmett’s mutilated body to tamp down publicity should be required viewing for young Americans who wish to know why the civil rights struggle was necessary.

In the minds of many Mississippians in 1955, a black man could justifiably be lynched even for looking at a white woman. Emmett was tortured and killed for allegedly “wolf whistling” at Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, a storekeeper in Money, MS. One of the tragedies of this case is that the so-called “wolf whistle” was probably a misunderstanding. Emmett had a speech impediment. When he got stuck on a word, he would stop speaking and abruptly whistle, as a way of untangling his tongue.

Over the last several decades, Hollywood has turned away even famous producers who wanted to bring this story to film. As an unknown, working quietly on his own, Beauchamp has succeeded where others have failed, casting new light on a crime that many thought would remain forever unpunished. The information in this film could conceivably change that, allowing law enforcement officials to achieve justice at last for Emmett Louis Till.

Source: SNCC mailing list

Row over painting leads to stomach vs. soul debate in Philippines

By Marites Sison

Manila, Philippines, Nov. 16 (IPS)— Filipinos have found themselves confronted with the classic dilemma of whether a person should buy bread to feed one’s stomach or flowers to feed one’s soul.

Did a government agency — the Government Service Insurance System (GSIS) — do the right thing by buying a 110-year-old painting of a foremost Filipino painter and historical figure at a Christie’s auction in Hong Kong last month for 46 million pesos (US $884,615)?

The GSIS said its purchase of the painting by Juan Luna, also a key figure in the struggle against Spanish colonization centuries ago, was meant to “save a piece of Philippine history.” But politicians and other critics said the government agency had wasted the badly needed resources of this poor country by buying it.

The controversial oil painting shows a woman sitting in a Paris cafe against the backdrop of three men in a huddle — Luna, Philippine national hero Dr. Jose Rizal and Ariston Bautista — all of whom had spent years of exile in Europe while campaigning against Spain’s colonization of the Phillipines.

This South-east Asian country was a Spanish colony for some four centuries starting in the 16th century. Luna did the painting, Parisian Life, in 1892, four years before Rizal was executed by Spain for rebelling against its rule and six years before a full-fledged armed revolution against Spain began.

“We are very happy that we are able to bring home this famous painting to its permanent residence,” GSIS chief Winston Garcia said at the unveiling of the painting at the GSIS Museum on Nov. 6.

But “you can’t eat a Luna,” remarked a congressman who said the money used to buy the painting should have been used to feed the hungry in this country of 80 million people, 40 percent of whom live below the poverty line.

“True. It is easier to eat grass than to eat canvass. But sheep eat grass, and a nation is not sustained only by what it takes into its stomach,” argued columnist Amando Doronila. “A nation also has a soul and it is this element that is sustained by culture and history.”

In a piece in the English-language daily Philippine Daily Inquirer, Doronila argued: “I think that when the national economy is depressed and when the political system has become a national embarrassment, the Filipino people look at two directions for salvation and redemption of their self-esteem.

“Either they embrace populist but ignorant demagogues who promise the moon or seek solace from inspiring monuments of excellence in the arts. Where politics have failed us, culture, arts and literature have sustained us,” he pointed out.

Still others, while not necessarily opposed to the preservation of artistic heritage, have asked if it was right for the GSIS to use funds coming from contributions of government employees to acquire the Luna painting.

“I sympathize with the critics. But why waste taxpayers’ money for one painting? The employees could have had an increase in salary or benefits. Some teachers haven’t received their retirement benefits yet,” wrote one student from the state-run University of the Philippines, who joined a cyber discussion on the issue.

The GSIS has argued that the money had come from its investment funds stemming from a healthy net income, and that it did not eat into funds for members in order to buy the Luna.

Its officials also said the agency wanted to buy the painting rather than see it go into the hands of foreigners, because Parisian Life had been scheduled to be auctioned by Christie’s.

The controversy that accompanied the Luna painting at the auction pushed up its price from an original price of 14 million pesos ($330,000).

Some critics also say that Parisian Life was not even a Luna masterpiece. Luna is best known by Filipinos for Spoliarium, which depicted the struggle of Filipinos for national liberation and which won the gold medal of excellence in the 1884 Madrid salon exhibition.

Spoliarium, once owned by the Spanish government, was returned to the Philippines as a gesture of goodwill and is now at the National Museum.

But regardless of what their views are over the purchase of the Luna painting, many agree that the row has underscored the need to do something about the country’s cultural legacy.

The return of the painting has “delivered a shock therapy that made Filipinos aware of the hemorrhage of national cultural treasures finding their way into foreign museums and collections of private art collectors,” said Doronila.

“It is widely known in Philippine cultural circles that we have lost an incalculable number of our artifacts through the porous regulations that are supposed to control the exit of these treasures,” he added.

Even the story of how Luna’s Parisian Life got out of the country remains sketchy. Newspaper reports have quoted the family that had owned the painting as saying that it had been taken from their ancestral home and sold without their knowledge to a foreign buyer, who in turn sold it to Christie’s.

“It is not enough to have a general law without the rules for its application, because confusion and chaos can ensue. What happens when the next Juan Luna goes on the market?” asked Maribel Ongpin, columnist for the English-language daily Today.