What the Black Struggle Tells Us About the Israel-Hamas War

In 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley changed American politics by using grief as a catalyst for human rights. “I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me,” she said about her son, Emmett, whose mutilated corpse she displayed publicly to prevent future lynchings. Mobley is the spiritual godmother of the Black Lives Matter movement, whose animating principle was that mourning in public could lead to egalitarian transformation. By making Black grief a spectacle that could not be ignored, she hoped that society might feel moved to start treating Black people as full human beings.

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