in hats and long coats lined up in front of soup kitchens were new to
me. When Dr. Kimball lectured on World War II, the screen showed
rows of fighter planes interspersed with the skeletal remains of
bombed cities. There were faces mixed in—FDR, Hitler, Stalin. Then
World War II faded with the lights of the projector.
The next time I entered the auditorium there were new faces on the
screen and they were black. There hadn’t been a black face on that
screen—at least none that I remembered—since the lectures on slavery.
I’d forgotten about them, these other Americans who were foreign to
me. I had not tried to imagine the end of slavery: surely the call of
justice had been heard by all, and the issue had been resolved.
This was my state of mind when Dr. Kimball began to lecture on
something called the civil rights movement. A date appeared on the
screen: 1963. I figured there’d been a mistake. I recalled that the
Emancipation Proclamation had been issued in 1863. I couldn’t
account for that hundred years, so I assumed it was a typo. I copied the
date into my notes with a question mark, but as more photographs
flashed across the screen, it became clear which century the professor
meant. The photos were black and white but their subjects were
modern—vibrant, well defined. They were not dry stills from another
era; they captured movement. Marches. Police. Firefighters turning
hoses on young men.
Dr. Kimball recited names I’d never heard. He began with Rosa
Parks. An image appeared of a policeman pressing a woman’s finger
into an ink sponge. Dr. Kimball said she’d taken a seat on a bus. I
understood him as saying she had stolen the seat, although it seemed
an odd thing to steal.
Her image was replaced by another, of a black boy in a white shirt,
tie and round-brimmed hat. I didn’t hear his story. I was still
wondering at Rosa Parks, and how someone could steal a bus seat.
Then the image was of a corpse and I heard Dr. Kimball say, “They
pulled his body from the river.”
There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother
had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance
between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered
boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation
was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts—the
fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the