"I'LL FLY AWAY" (DO REMEMBER: EMMETT TILL)" - Enstrumental + Hebru Brantley

“I’LL FLY AWAY (DO REMEMBER: EMMETT TILL).”
Enstrumental + Hebru Brantley.

A rerelease of this shirt due to inspiration from my recent trip to locations in the Mississippi Delta, in which I subsequently documented the horrendous and inhumanely unjust events and experience associated with Emmett Till’s trip to Mississippi in August 1955.

While most of us have frequently and unfortunately seen the horrific image of his mutilated corpse from his open-casket funeral in Chicago, I have always desired to focus on the images of him (smiling), or those with his mother.

When the 2 kidnappers/murderers came to his great uncle’s (Mose Wright) house early in the morning on August 28,1955, Emmett’s great aunt (Elizabeth Wright) rushed to where he was sleeping, to try and wake him up and sneak him out the back … I’ve always imagined and wished he could have been saved/rescued, and escaped falling victim to what was an evil societal structure – an assassination from an institutional arrangement.

Therein lies part of the inspiration for the art titled 'I'LL FLY AWAY (front of the shirt), resulting from an official collaboration with the artists extraordinaire Hebru Brantley. One of the beautiful and radical things about art is that it gives us the possibilities of what could be … or in this case what should have been.

NOTES:

-- This shirt was originally released in 2015 in limited quantities in the theater where I premiered the short doc that I wrote, produced, and released in the same year – “The Revenge of Emmett Till.” The film and drop was commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the death of Emmett Till.  It was then released in 2020, in commemoration of 65 years.
-- The term “Revenge” is not used in the literal sense.  It is a metaphor for the visible and invisible fight for injustice.
-- ALL of the proceeds from the sale of this shirt will be donated to the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center in Glendora, MS.