Hunter Gaults In My Place

In My Place is the memoir of a young girl's journey through the Civil Rights movement; a movement that forever transformed the status of African American people in America and changed the overall structure of our society today. Charlayne Hunter-Gaults vividly describes the many personal struggles throughout her life ranging from her childhood as an African American growing up in the deep south in the 40s and the daily combats with racism to the backlash received for becoming the first African American woman to enroll and attend The University of Georgia.
Throughout the book, Hunter Gaults also recalls many historical events during the civil rights era that included, marches, court battles, sit-ins and riots and how these events affected the
lives and views of herself, friends, and the black community as whole. One event in particular that hit home for Hunter Gaults was the murder of Emmett Till.
In Aug of 1955, a black teenager by the name of Emmett Till was murdered in in Money, Mississippi .
He dragged from his bed in the middle of the night, beaten and tortured for hours, shot in the head, and then tied to a fan and dropped in the Tallahatchie River. Till’s only fault was the accusation that he was whistling at a white woman at a store in Chicago. The two white men were acquitted by an all-white jury causing a inciting moment of the civil rights movement. Hunter- Gault described this event as an “ intrusion on my protected reality” (Hunter Gaults, p.115), and went on the explain how normal acts of racial violence such as the lynching of an older black man was more “normal” and less publicized then the death of Emmett Till. Ironically by the year 1955 it was recorded that over 4,028 African Americans have been lynched up until that point. So how does the lynching of older black men become viewed inferiorly in comparison to the death of Emmett until and why does this particular instance in comparison to all the other civil right moments deemed the start of the uprising amongst the African American community. According to Hunter-Gault, it was because she has never known of a younger black man dying, but according to It Takes a Tragedy to Arouse Them: Collective Memory and Collective Action during the Civil Rights Movement by Fredrick C. Harris, it was due to amount of “Collective Action” or political activism that occurred after the death of
Till.
The study examines the impact that collective memory has on different historical events throughout the civil rights movement and how it is positively correlated to the amount of political activism or collective action preceding these events. The theory proposes the idea that we remember and attach more with events that are publicized the most, forcing us to pay more attention to details, follow up, and ultimately rebel. Also by having political figure attached to an event increases the severity event, which ultimately gains followers and starts an uprising. The study concluded that the murder of Emmett Till had the strongest residual effect on black activism than any other event in the history of the Civil Rights movement and that Till’s death has the most impact on black insurgency in the 1950s.
Based off the findings in the article, as well as Hunter- Gaults thoughts and views, one can conclude that the murder of Emmett Till was a pivotal point due to two things. One being, although racial violence and the death of African Americans was normal during that era, the death of younger African American children wasn’t, causing an uproar. Not only because of the horrific acts but it was something that has not been experienced before at the time. Secondly, the death of Emmett Till was the most publicized event during the Civil rights era, from till’s casket photos to the many march’s that occurred afterwards, it was an event that captured the attention of the entire black community and ultimately created a monumental effort to end racial indecencies in America.