“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner famously wrote in the 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, about the vicious cycle of trauma that lies deep in the heart of America. It is a truth that plays out more frequently than we may know.
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Following the April 11 police shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright at a traffic stop, George Floyd’s girlfriend Courteney Ross revealed to the pressthat she had taught Wright while he was a student at Edison High School. The horrific convergence echoes that of Iberia Hampton, mother of slain Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, who babysat for Emmett Till before the 14-year-old boy was brutally murdered in 1955.
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The stories of Emmett Till and Fred Hampton are just two of the stories featured in Eyes on the Prize, a landmark 1987 documentary TV series chronicling about Civil Rights Movement, which is now streaming free for a limited time.
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