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Celebrate Black History Month at CHM as we look at the ways art has been a vehicle for social change in Chicago’s African American community. Enjoy hands-on arts activities, music, and speakers.

Schedule

10:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m. – Printmaking with Purpose with teaching artist Jomo Cheatham

10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. – Arts and Crafts for Social Change

12:00–1:00 p.m. – Public Talk | “Final Judgement: The Case of Emmett Till” by Dr. Christopher Benson

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Hear from Dr. Christopher Benson as he discusses details from his book A Few Days Full of Trouble: Revelations on the Journey to Justice for My Cousin and Best Friend, Emmett Till, coauthored with Reverend Wheeler Parker Jr. Get an insider’s view of the coauthors’ four-year “ride-along” with the FBI as it closed out the investigation into this 1955 lynching. The murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till sparked the modern Civil Rights Movement, yet so much has been concealed over the years. The case concerned so much more than racial violence, it was about power and how the criminal justice system bent under the pressure of a corrupt system.

1:30–2:30 p.m. – Film Screening | The Murder of Emmett Till (2023)

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In August 1955, a 14-year-old Black boy allegedly flirted with a white woman in a grocery store in Money, Mississippi. Emmett Till, a teen from Chicago, didn’t understand that he had broken the unwritten laws of the Jim Crow South until three days later, when two white men dragged him from his bed in the dead of night, beat him brutally and then shot him in the head. Although his killers were arrested and charged with murder, they were both acquitted quickly by an all-white, all-male jury. Shortly afterwards, the defendants sold their story, including their tale of how they murdered Till, to a journalist. The murder and the trial horrified the nation and the world. Till’s death was a spark that helped mobilize the civil rights movement. Three months after his body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River, the Montgomery bus boycott began.

Billy Boy Arnold performing at Mother Blues Billy Boy Arnold performing at Mother Blues, Chicago, Illinois, October, 1964. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-124881; Raeburn Flerlage, photographer.
Mama Gloria book cover cropped Mama Gloria: Daughter, Sister, Cousin, Friend, LGBTQIA+ Activist
Two women in the crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Two women in the crowd at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-036727 ; Declan Haun, photographer.
A man speaking to a smiling crowd carrying protest signs at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. A man speaking to a smiling crowd carrying protest signs at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington, D.C., August 28, 1963. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-078929; Declan Haun, photographer.
i052379 Lincoln Jubilee Album - 50th Anniversary Front Cover - Red. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-052379.

Speaker

Christopher Benson 2
Dr. Christopher Benson

Christopher Benson is a journalist, lawyer and associate professor in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Among his other works in magazines, newspapers and television, he also is the coauthor with the late Mamie Till-Mobley of Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, a Robert F. Kennedy Book Award honor.

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