Portico’s Part in Telling the Story of Emmett Till

The Emmett Till Memory Project teaches new generations about the tragedy that kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement. Preserving its digital assets is vital.

Emmett Till Headstone

Photo by Dave Tell via ETMP

Portico’s Part in Telling the Story of Emmett Till

By: Sara Ivry

On a late August day in 1955, Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi. A fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago, Till stopped with his cousins at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market to buy chewing gum. There, Till whistled at the clerk, a brazen act that violated the norms of the Jim Crow South and so angered the clerk’s husband and brother-in-law that they killed the boy.

The events and locations that tell the story of Till’s life and death have been memorialized in different ways and forms over the ensuing decades. The Emmett Till Memory Project (ETMP), an app, is one of them. It uses digitized archival documents, photos of those involved and of sites central to that fateful August day, and more so that users may educate themselves about who Emmett Till was and why his death still resonates. The ETMP’s digital assets are vital to ensuring the ongoing preservation of Till’s memory as well as his legacy.

That’s where Portico comes in. Dedicated to digital preservation, Portico has partnered with the ETMP to ensure the safekeeping in perpetuity of these digital artifacts.

Historian Dave Tell, a professor of communication studies at the University of Kansas, as well as the co-founder and director of the Emmett Till Memory Project, spoke with JSTOR Daily’s Sara Ivry about the Project and why its partnership with Portico is so critical.

Sara Ivry: How did you first learn of Portico?

Dave Tell: Kate Wittenberg reached out to me as part of the DEI efforts of her organization, specifically, a pilot project to support the preservation of archival content about under-represented topics that might be at risk. Kate contacted me about the time that we were massively reorganizing the Emmett Till Memory Project. She asked if she could just come along and preserve the site as it existed. I said, “Well, yes, you can, but we’re also trying to make it way better.” She sat in on development meetings over the last few years with us and has been an integral partner, not only in helping us think about preserving the site but helping us make design decisions that would render the site preservable.

Can you describe a little what the site was before you revamped it and what you were trying to do in the renovation?

The short story is we went live in October of 2019, and then in the pandemic, we used our last $10,000 of grant money to pay a DEI consultancy to tell us what we did well and what we did poorly. They did this entire audit, focus groups, they talked to the family, they talked to scholars. They looked at analytics, and they came back to us. Essentially, they told us great content, very bad design, which in retrospect is not surprising. Everyone on the project had been a content expert; we had never had design people on board. We had never had UX people.

The design only works for people who already know the story, they told us, which of course was a devastating blow to us. They also said this reads as if it was written by a middle-aged white guy and I’m like, “Well, I wrote it and I’m a middle-aged white guy—so fair enough.”

So, we hired a woman named Renee Payne out of the Rhode Island School of Design who runs a graphic design firm called included. She specializes in computer design for veterans of the Civil Rights movement; her clients include the families of Andy Young, Harry Belafonte, and family of Malcolm X. She assembled a team of young designers of color, and I said to them, “Nothing is sacred here. Let’s make this as good of a project as it can be,” and they reimagined it from the ground up.

When exactly then did Portico come on board?

Kate came in in the middle of this revamped process, and one of the specific things she encouraged us to do was to avoid third-party dependencies. The example that I understood was if you embed a YouTube video, your content is only as secure as YouTube, which you have no control over.

We really thought long and hard about what technologies we could preserve, and Kate and her colleague Karen Hanson pushed us to think about what exactly we’re preserving. The technologies we are currently depending on do not last forever, right? We changed our mindset. We don’t want to preserve this project so that like it will look the same for everyone into the future, but we want to preserve the assets.

Make images preservable, the text—the component parts.

Eventually we’re going to have a lot of immersive stuff on there. It’s only halfway there now. Portico helped us understand better to preserve the components that make up immersive pieces. In the future, people can use whatever technology is then current, use our same data, and create their own project.

I hadn’t thought about the built-in obsolescence of technology, and that we have to account and plan for that in the design of an app or site as well as in the design of an archive. Had you considered that before Portico got involved?

No, I’m a humanist by training, so when I first started thinking about digital preservation, probably a decade ago now, my gut instinct was we make the website just like a book. It’ll sit there unchanged forever. And Portico has been instrumental in changing the way I think about preservation—that first of all, forever might not be the goal.

Emmett and Mamie Till-Mobley on the exterior of the house they lived in from 1950–1955. Photo by Dave Tell via ETMP

Second, what gets preserved is not necessarily the sort of same experience that our users have today. What really matters and what needs to be preserved is what we have. The Emmett Till Memory Project has amazing artifacts. We have hours of audio with the family that they’ve given us permission to use that no one else has. We can tell the story in incredibly intimate ways and that’s super important. When you open this app, you’ll hear the voice of Reverend Wheeler Parker, Till’s cousin, narrating the story as all this stuff flashes on the screen behind you—I don’t care if the flashy, immersive technologies are preserved forever. But I care deeply that the audio files—and the voice of Rev. Parker—gets preserved. Someone else can build their own tools with that stuff. My ability to make that distinction is a testament to Kate and Portico.

Why is digital preservation of these assets critical in any case?

It’s almost hard to answer this question without going into cliche other than to say: Ignoring the past is a critical component of white supremacy. Full stop. What we want to do and what the family wants to do is tell the story—not that telling the story is sufficient for the change that they and I want to see, but it’s a critical part of the change that they and I want to see.

The Interpretive Center—what’s the first line of their mission statement, “We believe that racial reconciliation begins with telling the truth,” right?—that’s a sentence that accurately describes the vision of the Till family and it certainly describes my vision.

What was the origin of this app?

If you start from the murder of Emmett Till in August 1955 you have to count 49 years and 11 months before the state of Mississippi dropped a single dollar on the Till story. Eighteen citizens of Tallahatchie County thought that was ridiculous; they put up a commemorative sign that got shot, defaced with acid, spray painted.

Tallahatchie Civil Rights Driving Tour sign, ca. 2015. Photo by Pablo Correa via ETMP

In 2014, I got invited to go down, I’d been writing about Till for a decade and a half by then, and the question was: How do we tell Till’s story in the context of vandalism?

It’s easy to shoot a sign in the middle of the country. It’s harder to shoot an app.

What are some of the assets on the app that stand out to you?

My favorite by far are the hours of audio, oral history we have of Reverend Parker that was taken in his church in Chicago. We also drove him from site to site; we put a microphone on his lapel and on the sun visor of the car. And we just asked him what these sites meant to him as we went from place to place. All that audio’s not up yet, but we have it. (snip-a bit More)

Bernie Sanders says Americans ‘have a right to be angry’: Full interview

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) joins Meet the Press to discuss his criticism of the Democratic Party and what’s next for Democrats after Kamala Harris’ projected loss.

I am so tired of the lies about immigrants to please the maga bastards.

OK this is me just ranting before bed. Sorry. See I was an abused kid. Most of you who come here already know and don’t need any extra help in that to show you how badly I was abused. So I don’t need to show you more than my occasionally over the top ranting about my childhood abuse or the republicans claiming the republicans are stealing kids at the border … which is really what the republicans did. They separated parents from children and then gave the children to Christian adoption agencies to sell for profit. I wonder how their god feels about that. But please let’s keep talking about how Biden lost all these kids … who were never lost. Does any one else mind they are doing this????? Because as a human trafficked sexually abused and traded person … I fucking sure DO! Hugs.

https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-misinformation-migrant-children-missing-7ab0cea2fd2238346197429e952baa8b

https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2024-10-02/fact-focus-claims-that-more-than-300-000-migrant-children-are-missing-lack-context

I am so very very tired and sorry if I hurt anyone tonight. It just hurts what the republicans are doing and keep doing. They hurt adults … They hurt kids. They care for no one.

I wrote this post days ago and fell asleep before I could publish it. Hugs

The Dumbest Person You Know Thinks Trump Won Because Of Trans People

Vaush shows how trans people are a manufactured issue that really had no effect on the elections. He shows how the republicans talked about trans people non-stop while Harris never mentioned it once. The law says that trans prisoners get trans treatment because once a person is incarcerated their healthcare is the responsibility of the state. Trump followed the law also doesn’t matter to the host in his attempt to bash the left. Great way to showcase the five or so trans athletes did not affect the average person’s life but costs of living did. Hugs

Fact Check: Did Kamala Harris Lose More Than 325,000 Migrant Children?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/fact-check-did-kamala-harris-lose-more-than-325-000-migrant-children/ar-AA1rcC4F

I am so tired of this stupid lie. The right / republicans keep using it because the children they stole from parents at the border back during tRump’s term have never been found and returned to their parents. That is what this asshole false claim is about. Here are the facts. And also notice that the time frame includes tRump’s first term! Want to know why this pisses me off so much !!! Because as an abused kid I could have been saved if people had cared enough to do it. Instead the republicans do this shit that helps no child, helps no kid. Hugs

Kamala Harris is expected to visit the U.S.-Mexico border during a trip to Arizona this week as the Vice President attempts to win over voters on immigration policy ahead of the November election

Donald Trump has repeatedly targeted Harris over the number of border crossings during the Biden administration, highlighting the role handed to her by the president to investigate the root causes of migration in the Northern Triangle of Central America.

Trump went after Harris again earlier this week during a rally in Pennsylvania when he accused her of losing hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied migrant children who had entered the country.

Kamala Harris speaks during a press conference at El Paso International Airport, on June 25, 2021 in El Paso, Texas. Donald Trump has claimed the Vice President is responsible for the disappearance of 325,000 migrant children. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images© PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images

The Claim

At a speech in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on September 23, 2024, Donald Trump claimed that Kamala Harris had lost more than 325,000 migrant children.

“She [Kamala Harris] lost more than 325,000 migrant children,” Trump said.

“They’re gone, nobody knows where they are. Many of them are dead, many of them are in sex trade, many of them, but many of them are dead, they’ve been trafficked, they’ve been raped. Three hundred and twenty-five thousand children are missing.”

The Facts

Donald Trump’s claim is wrong with some caveats.

It appears his claim is based on an

August 2024 audit by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) that uncovered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) statistics on unaccompanied migrant children (UCs).

Between fiscal years 2019 and 2023, ICE transferred over 448,000 unaccompanied children to the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). After apprehension by the Department of Homeland Security, children are transferred by ICE to ORR.

ORR handles the care and custody of these children awaiting immigration hearings. Care and custody include placing children in shelters or with a sponsor. ICE is responsible for managing immigration cases, and the audit showed the agency struggled to monitor the whereabouts of many of these children after their release from ORR custody.

ICE reported that more than 32,000 children had failed to appear for scheduled immigration court hearings between 2019 and 2023. ICE also failed to serve Notices to Appear (NTAs) on 291,000 children, leaving them without scheduled court dates and outside the formal immigration process.

The “more than 325,000” figure appears to be a combination of the 291,000 children who had not been issued a court date and the 32,000 who did not appear for scheduled dates, off by a couple of thousand.

Crucially, the main figure to focus on is the 32,000 children who missed their court date, the audit noting that ICE “was not able to account for the location of all UCs who were released by HHS and did not appear as scheduled in immigration court.”

The audit also said that failure to send an NTA could limit the chances of maintaining contact when children are released from ORR custody, adding ICE did not always inform ORR about the failure to appear in court.

“Similarly, when ICE does not share information with HHS regarding UCs who did not appear for hearings, HHS personnel are unable to determine if UCs need wellness checks or post-release services for individuals at an increased risk of being trafficked,” the report stated.

“Without an ability to monitor the location and status of UCs, ICE has no assurance UCs are safe from trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor.”

However, Trump combined the figures even though the audit did not say that the 291,000 who had not been issued an NTA were lost.

The report also does not say that ICE could not find all 32,000 children who had not appeared in court. ICE is not a child welfare authority either; as explained here and in previous Newsweek fact checks, unaccompanied minors are placed into the care of sponsors if available which ORR is meant to monitor. Although there have been concerns regarding the risk of exploitation in this system, the context of who carries responsibility here is important.

Furthermore, the OIG audit covered cases between fiscal years 2019 and 2023. Although more children were transferred into ORR custody between fiscal years 2021 and 2023, Trump’s administration oversaw transfers during the 2019 and 2020 periods and part of 2021.

Newsweek has contacted media representatives for ICE, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the White House via email for comment.

Trump also claimed during his speech that “many” of the children were “dead”, “in sex trade”, and “raped.” The report does not make that conclusion. While the OIG report mentions exploitation vulnerability, it does not support Trump’s claim.

The Ruling

False.

Trump’s claim is based on an audit that showed between fiscal years 2019-2023 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had reported that more than 32,000 unaccompanied migrant children had not appeared in court for immigration proceedings. The audit found that ICE “was not able to account for the location” of all these children.

The audit also said ICE had not issued orders for 291,000 children to appear in court.

Trump appears to have combined these two figures to try to make 325,000. The audit did not state that the 291,000 without court orders were missing, nor did it say that all 32,000 children could not be located. ICE is not a child welfare authority and unaccompanied migrant children are placed in shelters or with a sponsor by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is meant to monitor placements.

The audit monitored reporting under the Trump and Biden administrations.

FACT CHECK BY Newsweek’s Fact Check team

How Trump’s second term will be different

Peace & Justice History 11/12

https://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/peacehistorynovember.htm#november12

sanewashing and wishcasting: how the press continues to fail us

by Jeff Tiedrich

if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay Read on Substack (Language NSFW, as always with Jeff Tiedrich’s writing)

the worthless scribblers of the corporate-controlled media utterly failed us during the 2024 campaign season.

New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn came right out and said it: defending democracy is a ‘partisan act,’ and we won’t do it — and, fuck us all, the press kept their word, and didn’t do it. they enthusiastically put their fingers on the scale for Donny Convict.

arguably, the media’s worst transgression was the sanewashing — the cleaning-up of Donny’s incomprehensible blitherings, to hide his obvious cognitive disintegration and make him sound coherent.

a minutes-long disjointed word-salad about how tariffs on Chinese goods were going to lower the cost of childcare became “a major economic speech.”

Donny’s inability to keep his increasingly-demented mind on the topic at hand — his crazypants pinballing from they’re eating the dawgs to Hannibal Lecter wants to have you for dinner to would you rather be eaten by a shark or electrocuted — was explained away by Donny as his brilliant “weave.”

that explanation, to The New York Times, “did all sort of seem to make sense.”

post-election, the media has mostly moved on from sanewashing, and has now jumped feet-first into wishcasting.

what’s wishcasting? over to you, Wiktionary.

[Wishcasting is] the act of interpreting information or a situation in a way that casts it as favorable or desired, despite the fact that there is no evidence for such a conclusion; a wishful forecast.

sure enough, the media has now gone into overdrive, churning out piece after piece in which they promise us that if we all click our heels together three times, everything will be okay.

not twelve hours after the election had been called for Donny, the Times wasted no time in assuring us that the election of a vindictive fascist is an amazing opportunity for vindictive fascism not to happen.

as I wrote three days ago,

the New York Times can fuck all the way off.

what kind of magical, everybody-gets-a-pony thinking is this? just fucking stop it.

did Ezra Klein and Ross Douthat both experience some kind of recent head trauma that has caused them to forget the years 2017 through 2020? Donny’s first presidency was a dumpster fire of corruption, mismanagement and mass death — but somehow now, given a second chance to fuck shit up worse, Donny’s going to bring us an “American renewal”?

anything’s possible, right? overnight, Donny Convict could magically become a wise and fair statesman — also, technicolor pigs could fly out of my ass.

oh my god, the media never stops imagining that Donny is going to somehow become presidential. during his first term — over and over — every time Donny stopped short of taking out his dick and pissing on the floor, the press would fall all the fuck over itself in a mad dash to proclaim him presidential.

spoiler alert: Donny never became presidential. not from the the first time he threw a ketchup-hurling tantrum in the White House, to the moment he absconded back to his Florida golf motel, taking with him boxes of stolen classified documents.

now, what the small-batch artisanal fuck is this?

the premise here is that if we’re respectful to Donny — if we fucking kowtow to him, and stop opposing him — he’ll be nice to us in return. he’ll become — dare I say it? — presidential.

Stop indulging the fantasy that outrage, social stigma, language policing, a special counsel, the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, or impeachment will disappear him. And stop talking as if normal political opposition is capitulation.

Everyone should normalize Trump. If he does something good, praise him. Trump is remarkably susceptible to flattery.

Mike Luckovich, explain to the nice people at the Atlantic why they’re living in a fever-swamp fantasy world.

news flash for Newsweek: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski are not going to save us.

okay, I will grant that Newsweek may be half right. Lisa Murkowski seems to genuinely loathe Donny, and we can probably count on her to vote against the worst of his fuckery — but Susan Collins? the credulous naïf who assured us over and over again that Donny had learned his lesson, and would never transgress again?

now, let’s bask under some rays of hope from people who aren’t just blindly wishcasting, but are actually offering reasoned arguments.

in the middle of a fairly clear-eyed assessment of the Trumpian horrors to come, the Guardian gives us this:

Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton administration, said: “For him to expand presidential power, Congress has to give up power and they’re not in the mood to do that. They’ve never done that. There are plenty of institutionalists in Congress.”

Kamarck also expressed faith in the federal courts, noting that judges appointed by Trump only constitute 11% of the total placed on the bench by former presidents. A Trump dictatorship is “not going to happen,” she added. “Now, there might be things that the president wants to do that people don’t like that the Republican Congress goes along with him on but that’s politics. That’s not a dictatorship.”

here’s Tom Nichols, in a piece titled Democracy Is Not Over.

Paradoxically, however, Trump’s reckless venality is a reason for hope. Trump has the soul of a fascist but the mind of a disordered child. He will likely be surrounded by terrible but incompetent people. All of them can be beaten: in court, in Congress, in statehouses around the nation, and in the public arena. America is a federal republic, and the states—at least those in the union that will still care about democracy—have ways to protect their citizens from a rogue president. Nothing is inevitable, and democracy will not fall overnight.

here’s Adam Serwer, from There Is No Constitutional Mandate for Fascism.

Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery. The restraints of the Constitution protect the American people from the unscrupulous designs of whatever lawless people might take the reins of their government, and that does not change simply because Trump believes that those restraints need not be respected by him. The Constitution does not allow a president to be a “dictator on day one,” or on any other day. The presidency will give Trump and his cronies the power to do many awful things. But that power does not make them moral or correct.

I sure hope to fuck they’re right.

This is going to be my closing message for the foreseeable future:

practice self-care. do what you need to do to keep sane. if that means disengaging with my daily posts for a while, I get it. this community of ours will still be here when you return.

to all the people who have signed on in the days since the election, welcome aboard. settle in as we all try to deal with the shitfuckery that’s ahead of us.

we are all in this together, and we are all here for each other.

The Week Ahead

by Joyce Vance

November 10, 2024 Read on Substack

This is a tough one to write.

My top-line thought for the week ahead: Don’t give up!

If you want to plan a protest, plan it. If you want to knit in public at a lecture, do it. Don’t let anyone else make the rules for you. You get to set your own vision for what it means to be persistently pro-democracy as we prepare to face what’s ahead.

For me, it means resisting the language of division that brought us here and working to maintain the big tent that helped us win the fight for four more years of democracy in 2020. People are down right now; none of us are at our best. So, give people a lot of space and understanding. But don’t be afraid to act on your own or enlist like-minded friends to come along with your plans. Don’t let anyone tell you that your way of expressing your love for country and Constitution isn’t the right way. There is a lot of that going around, as many people with good intentions are struggling.

If you’re looking for inspiration and have the concentration for a longer piece, read the words of Czech leader Václav Havel, who wrote The Power of the Powerless in 1978, ten years after the Soviet Union crushed Prague Spring. Havel explored the idea that individuals who might normally be seen as powerless can make common cause in dissidence against a repressive political structure. The Czechs did not have the centuries-long history of democracy like we do, nor did they have a Constitution in place that guaranteed rights like our does. Still, Havel pointed the way for them to resist a totalitarian system. Although the story of our coming struggle is likely to be very different from theirs, you may still take heart reading Havel, knowing that his people struggled free from a dictatorial regime and created a republic.

The outcome of this election has been incredibly hard to come to terms with. In my heart, I feared Donald Trump would win—I live in a state where many people support him and their numbers were strong—but I hoped and even dared to believe it wouldn’t happen. And of course, I was wrong.

We are in for tough times, and they will not be times to give up in. Lawyers are already preparing to do important work. They have the experience of 2016 to guide them. Project 2025 and Trump’s Agenda 47 vision are dark. But they are not self-executing; they will have to do the work to put them in place, and we need to be there every step of the way, pushing back. Never underestimate the value of the public voice.

But do take time to refresh your understanding of the policies this administration has rallied around in advance. I have not forgotten that in early July, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts commented that the coming revolution could be “bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

This interview with States United CEO Joanna Lydgate is an overview of Project 2025
This piece touches on climate and science
This piece talks about the impact of mass deportations
This piece linked Trump to Project 2025 after he disclaimed knowledge of it
This is an index of the columns I wrote about Project 2025 prior to last July

We have a long history and tradition of democracy in this country. We have local governments and organizations where we can run for office and use our power to make things better, even if Trump is trying to make them worse at the national level. We are still a constitutional democracy, and if we want to keep the Republic, we are going to have to fight to hold onto as many of our norms as we can.

But not all this week.

This week we are going to have to endure the winding down of the criminal cases against Donald Trump. That’s a gut punch for those of us who believed that accountability was possible and that Donald Trump wasn’t above the law.

Tuesday in Manhattan, Judge Juan Merchan is expected to rule on whether the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision impacts Trump’s conviction in the New York case. If the convictions survive, and they should, or at least some of them, expect a rocket of an appellate case going off, as Trump tries to avoid being sentenced later this month. He may succeed given the politics of the moment, but legally, there is no reason he can’t be sentenced, although, and I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, I expect that even if he receives a custodial sentence, he will not serve it because of the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. It’s an entirely unsatisfactory conclusion to one of the worst-ever violations of American democratic principles.

I don’t expect normal times ahead. I believe Trump when he tells us who he is. I believe MAGA when they tell us who they are. This wasn’t just a campaign where the winner takes office and we all move on happily together, shoring up our disappointment. We have to be prepared for that reality, and not get sucked into a “business as usual” version of what Trump’s time in office will look like.

We haven’t begun to fight yet, but as we get over the shock of the election, we can begin to get ready. As President Biden says, you can’t love your country only when you win. I’d add to that, you can’t be willing to fight for democracy only when it’s easy.

We’re in this together,

Joyce