Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I want to make sure that people understand
that you're not like
a lot of these people, like i talked about earlier, who said...
you know... who walk away from the cemetery and wipe their hands and say yes I'm
heartbroken about my daughter or my sister or my mother or whoever it might be's
death-
but let's just put water under the bridge and go on about our business.
uh...
You weren't willing to do that.
No, I wasn't. Not from the time I had to see her at..in her deathbed
uh... past the funeral, past everybody's uh... lies, and
I could not...I couldn't do this. And the thing I want everyone to
understand also is, the pictures you're going to see in this brochure are
pictures I see in my brain EVERYDAY.
There's not a day that goes by that I don't see my daughter so brutally
butchered...and I needed...
I needed people to understand. I needed the lie to stop. I needed someone to
care. She was so disfigured
and the uh... funeral director said, "Please, would you close this casket?" I said
"No."
"I need people to see her as she is." uh... And he was just distraught- he didn't
understand why I would do it- and at the time
I think...
I think God has his hand on you at.. at certain times, and at that time his hand
was just with me. And
I wanted people to see what had.. what she looked like. I wanted them to to be
able to see what I see.
Well, to put this in historical context, I'll call on brother Johnny, because I
know what you're thinking. Yes, you know we wet Emmett Till's mom
and uh...
Let's make sure people know who Emmett Till was.
Well, he was a... black fella..
uh... from Chicago, who went down south and
ended up getting killed.
He wasn't just killed- he was beaten, he was brutalized. Right. And uh...that was
happening to a lot of blacks, all over the nation. It was happen on a common basis
if a black stepped out of line, and being out of line didn't mean too much, all you had to do was just
about anything.
uh... Well in this particular case, this was a 16-year-old boy, he wasn't an adult male.
Right. A 16-year-old boy, and they say that he was
with another group of blacks who were outside of a general store. They were trying to
say he whistled or said something to a white lady that went by-
and that was enough.
uh... But he was beaten so bad they...
usually directors were always closed cast on that, and his mother
said "No. I want to show what they did to my baby.
I want them to see it."
And she had an open casket and people marched by; and all the sudden
the civil rights movement took another whole turn.
Cause there wasn't just hearing anymore...
It was seeing it.
It was the visual.
See that's what I was thinking about
when Deborah talked to me about... about doing this.
Marla can become
the Emmett Till of the pro-life movement.
uh... Like I said uh... Deborah, I wish that we weren't having this conversation.
I'll be honest with you. This is a hard thing to say, I wish I'd never met you-
because if Marla was still around I would never have met you, probably. Probably not.
But, you know we're embarking on a project right now that I think is going to be
gigantic, I think it's good, and I think she IS going to be the Emmett Till
of the pro-life movement. And this is something that we've been needing
for a long time; and I just want to tell you how much I appreciate
that you came to us and trusted us with this project.
We're going to do the best we possibly can to get this out as far as
we possibly can, and all the people here are going to do that; and I'm asking the
audience to help us do it. We need to hold this in front of the American
people. We need to make the abortion industry explain this.
And so i just wanna thank you for this opportunity... I.. I know the
circumstances are horrible- they're horrible for all of us.
but uh...
I'm promising you- we're going to do our our dead level best to make sure that
Marla is not forgotten.
I thank you from
the bottom of my heart...
and uh...
uh... I knew I could trust you... and uh...
I thank you. Well thank you. Thanks for being with us.