The citizens in New Orleans, generation after generation, have chosen joy in the face of disaster and oppression. Everything unique about the city is… - Wright Thompson

The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.

I profile famous and successful athletes for a living and almost no one understands that success is merely a currency to spend on one big purchase.

Julian and his dad were men of different times. That's how it is with fathers and sons. The act of panning a generational divide is the single most important thing either person will do in their lifetime; the relationship depends on making that leap successfully.