"Black Death Spectacle" was a performative art piece by Parker Bright. Bright stood in front of a painting of Emmett Till by a white artist. The painting called Open Casket (2016) by Dana Schultz depicts a mangled Emmett Till in his casket. Emmett Till, a teenage boy, was visiting family in Mississippi. There was an interaction between him and a white woman, Carolyn Bryant. Later he was abducted, tortured and killed by two white men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam [1]. His killers were quoted in a magazine saying that they kidnapped and murdered Till because he didn’t know his “place.” The murderers were acquitted by an all-white jury. This injustice was a catalyst for the civil rights movement in the 1960s [2]. The timeline below shows Emmett Till’s birth through the moment of Parker Bright’s Black Death Spectacle. It highlights moments after Till’s death of black people reclaiming the story and demanding justice. I then focus on the events that have happened during Parker Bright’s lifetime and the cultural trauma that he has endured which echoes the civil rights era despite Bright being born more than 50 years after Till.

To view a larger version of the graphic below, use this link: TIMELINE

(1) Matthew Wills, “How Local Newspapers Helped Emmett Till’s Murderers Go Free,” JSTOR Daily (August 15, 2020),  https://daily.jstor.org/how-local-newspapers-helped-emmett-tills-murderers-go-free/

(2) Davis Houck, “Killing Emmett,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs Vol. 8, No. 2 (Summer 2005): 225-262.

(3) William Bradford Huie, The Shocking Story of Approve Killing in Mississippi, Look, January 24, 1956, reprinted in 1 Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1963, 239.

(4) Erhardt Graeff, Matt Stempeck and Ethan Zuckerman, The battle for 'Trayvon': Mapping a media controversy online and offline, First Monday, February 3, 2014, Vol. 12, No. 2. https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/123459/Graeff-trayvonarticle.pdf?isAllowed=y&sequence=1

(5) Ransby, Barbara. Making All Black Lives Matter : Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2018.