Oprah Says She Had ‘Flashbacks of Emmett Till’ Watching the Derek Chauvin Verdict

BY: Denver Sean

Published 4 years ago

Like many of us, Oprah Winfrey had an emotional reaction to witnessing Derek Chauvin get found guilty of murdering George Floyd.

via Page Six:

“I watched the verdict live — like so many other people around the world,” she told Dr. Oz in an upcoming interview.

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“I started to tear up and I asked myself, ‘Where is this emotion coming from?’ And I was having … flashbacks of Emmett Till and all the names that we’ve heard protesters speak for.”

Winfrey told Oz that she had a dream about Till — the Mississippi 14-year-old who was lynched in 1955 after a white woman accused him of flirting with her — the night before the verdict where “we were all on a bus together and the bus blew up.”

“And so I wake in that morning like, what does that mean? And does that mean this whole trial is going to blow up…?,” she said. “So I went to bed [after the verdict] thinking about Emmett Till and the fact that he never received justice. And this moment was a sacrifice for all of the people who didn’t receive justice.”

On April 20, former cop Chauvin was convicted of second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter for his part in the killing of George Floyd. He’ll be sentenced in June.

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Winfrey sat down with Oz to speak about her new book “What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing.” She also opened up about her childhood traumas including the time her grandmother gave her a “really bad whipping” after she accused her of putting her fingers in the family’s bucket of drinking water.

“My emotion now is not because I feel, you know, such deep pain about it, I just feel pain for that little girl. I feel like, now I know what it’s like to be you know, you look at a three, four-year-old, five-year-old child and how innocent they are. And at the time, I just accepted it,” she said.

Dr. Oz’s interview with Oprah airs on Thursday. Will you be watching?

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