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More than 70 years after the kidnapping, torture and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, a major new photography exhibit and companion book ask how the world would be different “If Emmett Till Lived.” The Black teenager’s brutal murder, as well as his open-casket funeral that displayed his mutilated body, shocked the United States in 1955 and became a galvanizing moment in the civil rights movement. If Till had lived, he would be just over 85 years old today.

“Art really is one of the critical modes of creating an appeal to the moral imagination,” says historian Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, the curator behind “If Emmett Till Lived” and editor of the book.

Lewis collaborated on the project with Till’s surviving cousin, Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr., the last living witness to see Till alive. The exhibit opens at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago on September 10.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, with Juan González in Chicago.

Mamie Till-Mobley Refused to Let Her Son, Emmett Till, Be Forgotten

What if Emmitt Till had lived? What if he had safely boarded the train back home to Chicago? More than 70 years after the kidnapping, torture and lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi, a major new photography exhibit and companion book asks those questions by imagining not only the life young Emmett lost, but the decades he was denied. This is the exhibit’s curator, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS: What if Emmett Till lived? What if he had returned home still a child, alive and free? What would that life have required of us all? These questions invite a reckoning with the past and a probing investigation of the current state of American life. This exhibition, this publication and the invitation together offer a collective arena to consider how freedom has been secured on American ground. It is a creative monument to Emmett Till’s unlived life. It lets us picture what could have come, what should have come. It lets us imagine it, what it wrought, and what it signals about the work that remains.

SARAH ELIZABETH LEWIS: What if Emmett Till lived? What if he had returned home still a child, alive and free? What would that life have required of us all? These questions invite a reckoning with the past and a probing investigation of the current state of American life.

This exhibition, this publication and the invitation together offer a collective arena to consider how freedom has been secured on American ground. It is a creative monument to Emmett Till’s unlived life. It lets us picture what could have come, what should have come. It lets us imagine it, what it wrought, and what it signals about the work that remains.

AMY GOODMAN: If Emmett Till had lived, he would have turned 85 years old on July 25th, the day the Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has declared Emmett Till Day. But Till was murdered at the age of 14 on August 28th, 1955, dragged from his great-uncle’s home in Money, Mississippi, by two white men for allegedly whistling at a white woman. They beat, tortured and shot Till, tied a heavy cotton gin fan to him with barbed wire, threw his body into the Tallahatchie River. His body was discovered several days later.

Mamie Till-Mobley, Emmett Till’s mother, had his body returned to Chicago for burial. She insisted on an open casket so the world could see the brutality of bigotry and racism. Jet magazine and other publications carried photos of Emmett Till’s beaten, distended face in his coffin, shocking the world and galvanizing the civil rights movement.

Speaking to Democracy Now! in 2000, Mamie Till-Mobley reflected on the painful moment she learned about her son’s murder.

MAMIE TILL-MOBLEY: When we knew that Emmett was dead, our first action — we couldn’t take time to cry. As I announced to the family what was happening, of course there were screams. People were hitting the floor, and the hysteria was setting in. And I remember standing, announcing that “We don’t have time to cry now, we’ve got to do something. I don’t know what to do, and you’ve got to help me come to make some decisions.”

MAMIE TILL-MOBLEY: When we knew that Emmett was dead, our first action — we couldn’t take time to cry. As I announced to the family what was happening, of course there were screams. People were hitting the floor, and the hysteria was setting in. And I remember standing, announcing that “We don’t have time to cry now, we’ve got to do something. I don’t know what to do, and you’ve got to help me come to make some decisions.”

AMY GOODMAN: The voice of Mamie Till-Mobley on Democracy Now! a quarter of a century ago. To see the whole interview, you can go to democracynow.org.

The new exhibit, “If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground,” opens September 10th at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College Chicago. Drawing from the museum’s permanent collection, it invites visitors to imagine the decades Emmett Till never lived, the neighborhoods he might have walked, the civil rights struggles he might have witnessed, the family he might have built, the ordinary moments of joy he never had the chance to experience.

It comes as the Trump administration has escalated attacks on DEI — diversity, equity and........

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