What if Emmett Till had made it safely home?

Sarah Lewis started asking the question, “What if Emmett Till had lived?” during a trip to the Mississippi Delta region two years ago, when she stood by the Tallahatchie River, at the spot where the Black teenager’s brutalized body was recovered in 1955.

The sign now marking the site, Lewis noted, weighs 500 pounds and is bulletproof, made from AR500 steel and fronted with acrylic. It is the fourth iteration of the marker at Graball Landing, the previous three having been thrown into the river or defaced by bullet holes. Till’s abduction and murder, followed by the acquittal of two white men who later confessed in a magazine interview, helped catalyze the Civil Rights Movement.

“What does it mean that, over 70 years after the unjust murder of Emmett Till, we still can’t honor his life? And what has to transform in the moral imagination to insist on the right to life?” asked Lewis, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies. “I had, in that moment, looked more toward the work of law and politics for transformation. But then realized, if a marker is elected as the site of resistance, then there must be a counternarrative force.”

Lewis’s curated exhibition, “If Emmett Till Lived: Freedom on American Ground,” opened September 10 at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago. The show, featuring images by over 110 artists, invites viewers to imagine the 14-year-old Chicagoan reaching adulthood and even old age (Till would have turned 85 this year). In one 1961 photo by Milton Rogovin, a young Black woman closes her eyes and lifts her face to the sun. A 1985 photo by Dawoud Bey shows a man waiting at a bus stop. A 1988 photo by Stephen Marc shows a father tossing his child in the air at the beach.

In an interview with the FAS Current, edited for length and clarity, Lewis discussed her curatorial approach to the show, her collaboration with the Till family, and the power of a striking photo.

Tell me about this exhibition, and how it came together.

When The Museum of Contemporary Photography had invited me to curate a show in Chicago, I saw it as a way to create Emmett Till’s untaken journey home from Mississippi to Chicago. I did this in collaboration with Emmett Till’s cousin and best friend, Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. — the last living eyewitness to his abduction before his murder in 1955.

I went through all 18,000 photographs in the museum’s collection. The American story is represented in each. It occurred to me that any image that can create a prompt to the moral imagination, or an episode in Emmett Till’s life, could be part of the show. To recreate that journey from Mississippi to Chicago, I invited civic and cultural leaders — alongside my Harvard students, all leaders as well — who represent that geographic line in their birth state to each select a photograph. They became, in effect, the pallbearers, taking the body back to Chicago.

Over 110 photographers take you sequentially through the alternate pathways his life could have had: potential fatherhood, leadership, ordinary moments of joy, going to a coffee shop, having his first kiss, having the natural end to his life to which he was entitled. It is my hope that the show forces us to remember that we have the means to reimagine our future.

Does photography lend itself well to this type of inquiry?

What art often does best is transform the moral imagination by creating an appeal to the moral conscience. Mamie Till-Mobley [Till’s mother] had the prophetic wisdom to understand that vision, and the image would be critical for the extended Civil Rights Movement. She insisted on opening the casket to show the nearly unimaginable brutality and abuse that her son suffered at the hands of the culture of Jim Crow rule, and in so doing, opened America’s eyes.

At the funeral, she placed photographs of her son taken that Christmas on the casket to create the contrast between the unimaginable abuse he suffered and who he actually was. She was pushing back against the narrative distortions about her son.

That act situated Mamie Till-Mobley in the headwaters of Frederick Douglass about the importance of the image for justice. Douglass believed that the new technology of the photograph would be as important as law and norms. As my colleagues John Stauffer, Celeste Marie-Bernier, and Zoe Trodd have shown, Douglass became the most photographed American man — not Black American man, but American man. His aim was to create a counternarrative. Following in that tradition, W.E.B. Du Bois, shortly after graduating from Harvard, mounted “The Exhibit of American Negroes” in Paris in 1900 because he understood the need for the counternarrative force that an image can create.

What was it like collaborating with Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr.?

You can go no higher than the spirit of Rev. Parker Jr., who is Emmett Till’s cousin, best friend, and the last living eyewitness to his murder. He is 87. He was 16 when he was last with Emmett Till.

Having lived through the worst, he’s forgiven all and has an extraordinarily open heart. He was asked by Mamie Till-Mobley to carry the torch to continue this work, which he does with his wife, Dr. Marvel Parker. It's been an absolute privilege to have so much time with him. The show is accompanied by previously unheard reflections by Rev. Parker about Emmett Till’s life, inspired by the photographs. They’re mounted on the wall above the images.

As a curator, how did you approach imagining an unlived life?

We don’t know what Emmett Till would have done past age 18, so when I engaged with the entire collection, I wanted to offer multiple pathways. I researched his interests. He loved softball. He wanted to be a motorcycle cop. One family member thought he might be a reverend.

Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. thinks he would have been a leader, at the center of anything. So that determined what I placed on the walls. The collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, being connected to Chicago, helped create specific color and granular detail about experiences he should have been entitled to — seeing the rise of everything from Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama to Oprah Winfrey and the Chicago Bulls. There’s a photograph of the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. I found out that he went there with Wheeler Parker Jr. There’s a world around every image in the exhibition.

I also ensured that the audience knows that Emmett Till did live; I included many photographs by Danny Lyon and Bruce Davidson and of the Civil Rights Movement, because Emmett Till is effectively in those photographs, even in his death.

What do you hope viewers take away from the exhibit?

Many moments in American society are really forcing us to ask, “What does truth and reconciliation require?” Part of what it requires is witnessing, and not only witnessing events of injustice, but witnessing of a kind that prompts the moral imagination. My hope is that it’s also a reminder to use all the means at our disposal, including the work of culture, to honor our past to recreate our future.