John Lewis, who was fifteen at the time, reacted like many black teenagers: “I was shaken to my core,” he recalled in his memoir. “He could have been me. That could have been me, beaten, tortured, dead at the bottom of a river.”[9] The Till lynching shook me up too. I was seventeen, beginning my second year at Shorter College in North Little Rock, Arkansas, where I was the daily news reporter to the student assembly, focusing on local, state, national, and world events. I read stories to the college community about the atrocity, the trial and acquittal of the accused men. Like Lewis, I
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