Fear and injustice are two simple words that plague our existence as black men in America.

Fear that we can be gunned down at any moment by a man and the public will accept it based on the color of his uniform and the color of our skin.

Fear that our parents will get that phone call and see our image destroyed by the media.

Injustice when people justify murder with recycled phrases and the jury of “peers” bears no resemblance to the victim.

Injustice when murderers walk free because their words are more powerful coming from a white body. Injustice when the black man (or the black boy) gets the last say at the table.

On Aug. 28, 1955, Chicago native Emmett Till was killed while visiting his relatives in Mississippi. Till was 14 years old, a boy from the north who whistled to alleviate his stuttering as he talked to a cashier, Carolyn Bryant, in a candy store.

At the time, Bryant (now Carolyn Donham) said Till used choice words, harassed her, and assaulted her.

Bryant’s husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother J.W. Milam, abducted Till, mutilated him, beat him nearly to death, and shot him before throwing his body into a river.

Till’s body was sent to his mother in Chicago several days later. She held an open casket funeral to show what was done to her son. Thousands attended or saw the images of his mutilated body.

Roy Bryant and Milam were acquitted of the crimes, but later admitted to “Look” magazine that they had killed Till.

Till’s killing was a catalyst for the civil rights movement, pushing African-Americans to fight for their rights, to not trust a system that was designed to work against them.

Black media outlets showed the disgust towards the decision and sparked more outrage. Some white media outlets pushed back. They brought out rap sheets about Till’s father committing crimes to justify the killing of Till, changing the views of many white Americans on his killing.

The justifications for such killings haven’t stopped.

The outcry around the killings of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, and others are met with responses of what these boys should have done. The masses and the media constantly attempting to silence our pain by demonizing these boys and calling them thugs.

We constantly hear the same old song being played today on an exhausted horn. We’ve been calling for reform since the 1950s, yet the same answers and the same results are what we receive. And we endure, knowing that “the talk” with our young boys means they might not come home one night. We endure, knowing that our words, and overwhelming evidence matters not, knowing that the words of a white man or woman have more weight.

An interview with Carolyn Bryant (Donham) from 2008 was included in a recently published book by historian Timothy B. Tyson (“The Blood of Emmett Till”) in which Bryant admitted her accusations of sexual advances by Till were false.

What we knew all along was confirmed by her. Our words didn’t matter then.

So we are constantly screaming “Black Lives Matter” to show the injustice, to show that both our words and our lives matter. To show that when black boys are killed, that they will never die in vain or be forgotten. To show the young boys that there is life beyond what they see on TV and if they die unjustly, we will immortalize them.