“‘Bye baby,” a mischievous Emmett “Bobo” Till tossed out to the  pretty white woman as he left her family’s small-time grocery store—and then, full of the bravado a fourteen-year-old knows when surrounded by a dozen friends egging him on, he whistled at her and ran away. Almost immediately, it seems, the fearful reality of an entrenched but recently besieged Southern racist code sank in, and Bobo retreated to his great-uncle’s shack to hide out and hope his transgression went unanswered. Though most accounts of the events leading up to Emmett Till’s death have him defiant and unbowed to the end, they come from his murderers. Moses Wright, Bobo’s uncle and host for his summer getaway, always maintained the kid was scared and wanted to go home, back to the urban world of Chicago that he better understood, where, apparently, boasting about dating and even “having” white women was something black kids did, out of nothing more sinister than idle fantasy, in the way of kids passing the time imagining all manner of things they can’t have.

Given his propensity for both stuttering and pranks, Bobo’s actions that day remain a bit unclear: Did he touch Carolyn Bryant’s arm? Did he actually mention dating? Was his faux flirty behavior genuinely frightening to the young woman alone in the store except for this group of rowdy teenagers, or was she merely outraged at the breach of respect and tradition? But given the intimidation tactics of rural, racist Money, Mississippi, in 1955, it was clear that a single truth would never really emerge except for this: Emmett Till paid for his impudence with his life.

 *****

When I looked at Joan Walsh’s recap of the Denver convention I was struck by the kiss between Barack Obama and Jill Biden—awkward and accidental, to be sure, but provocative nonetheless given the history of racism in America. I kept going back to it, stopping the frame, seized by emotion. Perhaps it’s the graduate history class I just completed at Hiram College with an enormously talented professor for whom race is central to life and work, but I felt, quite physically, the poignancy of this image of a black man, poised to be the leader of the free world, puncturing the ultimate racial barrier--public affection for a genteel white woman.

 As it turns out, I’m not the only one so moved: The kiss is all over the internet, albeit with boatloads of blather accompanying its replay. Curiously, much of the commentary lacks focus, dwelling along the vein of “Well, I saw this and I don’t know what it means” or “Isn’t this cute (or funny or sweet)” or, mostly, “What’s the big deal?” On a Hannity thread and even in the darkest cyber corners of reductive right-wing politics, the sentiment starts with “Sure, Obama is the worst candidate ever” but reassures us with “So he kissed Biden’s wife—what’s the BFD? There’s nothing wrong with that…” as if to knock down in advance any challenges to its proclaimed harmlessness. I’m exceedingly grateful for that small contribution to racial progress.

        Because progress it is. According to my professor at Hiram and the historians quoted at the PBS American Experience website, much of the resistance to integration in the South was about protecting white womanhood. In fact, purity and motherhood and femininity were conflated with Southern culture, so that white women personified the South itself. At the heart of white male culture was a desire to protect the virtue of women, and therefore of life as they knew it, from the certain lasciviousness of every black man ranging toward their mothers and daughters and sisters. Indeed, in a book published the year Till was born, white Southerners made clear that what they believed blacks wanted most from integration was “intermarriage and sexual intercourse with whites,” while blacks ranked that category last (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/timeline/index.html). That women were thought to need this kind of protection, by the way, is profoundly demeaning, an exquisite intersection of racism and sexism.

And Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, that landmark Supreme Court ruling just prior to Bobo’s grisley murder? All about sex, apparently. Southern white men were convinced, according to historian Stephen Whitfield, that the aim of the civil rights movement was racial intermarriage and that mixed classrooms were just a step toward the bedroom. And here I thought that case was about equal rights for all American school children.

*****

It’s no small thing that on August 28, 2008—53 years to the day that Emmett Till was dragged from uncomfortable slumber on his uncle’s back room floor, kidnapped, tortured, shot, and drowned for intimating, however symbolically, a shared humanity between himself and a white woman—Barack Obama in full view of upwards of 35 million people bounded onstage in Denver and fumblingly kissed the lovely Jill Biden without an attendant crash of the social order. I might venture to say that's one BFD.

 (The killers' confession in LOOK magazine, just a few months after their acquittal by an all-white jury, is here. Notice the pervading sense of responsibility they felt in maintaining the social code. It's evident in some of the letters to the editor that followed as well.)