Trying to put myself in others shoes

Something that stood out to me was Emmett Till. It's hard to look at pictures of him and think that he was a real person who was actually mutilated like that. It's hard for me imagine that someone could have that much hate in their heart to hurt someone like that and treat them as if they are less to human. I wonder if these men ever put themselves in the shoes of the people they were hurting, how different would they act if they were the victims of this disgusting behavior. It's also very interesting to me that his funeral was open casket. It makes everything that happened to him so much more real, it's hard for me to look at photos but to think there are people who actually saw his destroyed and mangled body. Throughout this process I've really began to think about the fact that literally the only reason people had to hate on people of color was their skin tone, this fact is becoming more concrete in my mind as I learn the lives of the various activists like the North Carolina A & T four who fought for what we have today. I had the opportunity to participate in a Greensboro sit in simulation. I had people breath in my ear, tell me I was ugly, threaten to murder me and drive a fork through my neck all in less than two minutes. It's hard to fathom that people who participated in sit-ins had to endure this torture for hours and two minutes felt like an eternity to me. The Greensboro four and other activists, were such great people, individual of the hard work they put into the civil rights movement and it's hard to think that someone could ever possibly be so disrespectful to them, and that it is just because their skin tone. 

Kelsey Curtis, The Park School of Baltimore