A Quote by Fred Shuttlesworth

And the fact that Emmett Till, a young black man, could be found floating down the river in Mississippi, as, indeed, many had been done over the years, this set in concrete the determination of people to move forward.
The people of Mississippi, black and white, and young and old, can be proud of a banner that puts our faith front and center. We can unite under it. We can move forward together.
In terms of - my relationship with so many, many young people. I would - I would guess that there are many young people who would come forward. Many more young people who would come forward and say that my methods and - and what I had done for them made a very positive impact on their life. And I didn't go around seeking out every young person for sexual needs that I've helped. There are many that I didn't have - I hardly had any contact with who I have helped in many, many ways.
Clearly we're in historic times here. We have - one of the tributaries of the Mississippi River is a river called the Merrimack. And the crest areas there - they're going to be a number of feet, 2, 3, 4, over what they were in '93 or '82. And on the Mississippi River itself, down below St. Louis, we're still projecting a couple of feet over that historic number. So the bottom line is there's a significant amount of water that's causing evacuations and challenges throughout that whole area.
The Mississippi is not the only river. There's the Tallahatchie and the Big Black. People have been put in the river year after year, these things been happening.
10 years ago the black man knew what his condition was. And today, because of the world revolution that's taking place all over this earth, the black man would be fighting for what he knows is his by right, but the movement on the part of [Martin Luther] King and the others had done nothing but slow down the militancy that is inherent in the nature of the black man.
We have two boys. After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, we had to explain to our older son, who was 12 at the time, how that could happen. Instead of hugging and consoling him, my husband pulled out a documentary about Emmett Till and showed it to him and started to talk about how the justice system works in this country - and how it often doesn't. From that conversation, our son wrote a short story about Trayvon Martin going to heaven to meet Emmett Till.
After my husband died more than a decade ago, my mother prayed that I would remarry so that I could have a "normal" life again. Many people assumed that it would be too difficult for me to carry on as a single mother and raise a child without a man at my side. As the years went by, I found that it was indeed possible and that, in fact, I had no desire to remarry.
Adults who loved and knew me, on many occasions sat me down and told me that I was black. As you could imagine, this had a profound impact on me and soon became my truth. Every friend I had was black; my girlfriends were black. I was seen as black, treated as black, and endured constant overt racism as a young black teenager.
Emmett Till and I were about the same age. A week after he was murdered... I stood on a corner with a gang of boys, looking at pictures of him in the black newspapers and magazines. In one, he was laughing and happy. In the other, his head was swollen and bashed in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets, and his mouth twisted and broken... I couldn't get Emmett Till out of my mind, until one evening I thought of a way to get back at white people for his death.
I think that if we really want to break it down, that non-black filmmakers have had many, many years and many, many opportunities to tell many, many stories about themselves, and black filmmakers have not had as many years, as many opportunities, as many films to explore the nuances of our reality.
Most of the locks and dams on the upper Mississippi River system are over 60 years old and many are in serious need of repair and rehabilitation.
I thought of Emmett Till, and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back, I just couldn’t move.
I may sound naive, since everyone's decided the next two years are going to be all about 2016, but I look at what's happened over the years when there's been divided government. That's when we've done tax reform, that's when we've done entitlement reform - to move this economy forward on these big issues.
I'd been arrested many times by then. I'd been an organizer, so many things had changed over those three years [from 1965 till 1968].
One of the first things I did as a new Member of Congress was help form a bipartisan Mississippi River Caucus so we could work together from both the North and the South in order to draw attention to the resources that are needed along the Mississippi River.
If a stick is floating down a river and gets stuck, it doesn't need years of therapy. It just needs a little nudge and then it will get back into the flow of the river.
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