Parenting for Liberation. Trina Greene Brown

      Introduction

      In 2014, when my son was five years old, it seemed like every time I watched the news, I saw another Black person being murdered or impacted by state violence. It wasn’t only adult men and women, but young Black children’s lives that were (and still are) being taken by those sworn to “protect and serve.” The recurring images of Black bodies left in the streets after being shot by police (such as Michael Brown, an eighteen-year-old gunned down in Ferguson, Missouri, in the summer of 2014 whose lifeless body lay in the street for four hours), coupled with the historical legacy of Black bodies hanging after lynchings, compounded my fears as a Black parent. Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, and Tamir Rice—are contemporary Emmett Tills. I became worried that I would become a modern-day Mamie Till-Mobley, a mother-turned-activist after her fourteen-year-old son, Emmett Till, was murdered in the summer of 1955 in Mississippi when Carolyn Bryant Donham falsely accused him of whistling at her. Mamie is a foremother to the many modern-day “mothers of the movement,” all of whom are compelled by grief to share their children’s deaths publicly with the world; it is a “club” that many Black mothers are fearful that