During a recent baseball game between the Chicago White Sox and the Minnesota Twins, a message flashed on the scoreboard at Guaranteed Rate Field. Under the banner “Other Famous People from Chicagoland” appeared photos of actor Orson Welles, “Wheel of Fortune” host Pat Sajak and, in the middle, Emmett Till.

In the summer of 1955, 14-year-old Emmett went to visit family in Mississippi, where he was lynched for whistling at a white woman. The story made headlines around the world, especially when his killers were freed by a jury of white men.

On June 29, a photo of the ballpark scoreboard was posted on Twitter, then picked up by Deadspin, which emphasized the tastelessness of putting the Till tragedy alongside such lighthearted trivia. Deadspin castigated the White Sox’s ignorance, Chicago media outlets picked up the story, and a club representative agreed that while the display showed “poor form,” no one meant any disrespect.

The White Sox, it turns out, were Emmett Till’s team. He dreamed of being a ballplayer, sparked by seeing his favorite star at Comiskey Park, left fielder Minnie Minoso, who broke the color line for the Sox in 1951. The Till family’s South Side home was a little more than 2 miles from the old Comiskey Park, and the team was in contention during the summer of 1955. The Sox ended their season just five games behind the hated Yankees.

Even closer to Comiskey was the church where Till’s wake was held at the end of July, walking distance from the ballpark. When Till’s shattered body came home on the Illinois Central Railroad, his mother, Mamie Till Bradley, asked morticians not to prettify her son, and she insisted on a glass-covered coffin. “Let the people see what they did to my boy,” she said.

Tens of thousands of people came to the funeral at the Church of God in Christ on South State and 40th streets. They stood in line for hours, recent migrants from the South and their children, peering downward at Till’s ruined face and inward to their own nightmares of American racism.

Mamie Till Bradley also allowed photographs to be taken of her son’s mutilated face. They were published in Jet magazine and the Chicago Defender then passed around in African American communities, north and south. Decades later, Muhammad Ali, Rep. John Lewis, James Baldwin, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anne Moody all described the shattering impact of those images, but also their renewed commitment to fight American racism.

The Till murder was an important milestone in the freedom struggle. For months after the jury acquitted the killers, Emmett Till rallies broke out across America, and thousands of people turned out week after week, urging Congress to pass new legislation, including an anti-lynching law. Eventually the funeral photographs became iconic outside of black communities, emblems of the terrible violence of racism. The images first emerged in mainstream media here in Chicago in 1985, in a local documentary produced by Rich Samuels for WMAQ, then in a nationally televised history of the civil rights movement, “Eyes on the Prize.”

So yes, it was insensitive of the White Sox to mingle photos of a lynching victim with those of a movie star and a game show host. Yes, the juxtaposition of celebrity culture with a victim of American racism was, infelicitous, “poor form.” I’ll take the White Sox at their word that it was an honest mistake. Certainly no young staffer, ignorant of history, deserves singling out.

But what do we expect? History is taught poorly if at all in our schools, college humanities curricula are gutted in favor of vocational training. We denigrate our past, ignore it or, alternatively, make a theme park of it.

No, there was nothing malicious about what happened at that White Sox game, just an honest mistake, growing out of honest ignorance of America’s history and Chicago’s.

And that is the point. History is filled with unpleasant facts and horrific stories, but also true nobility. The Till saga featured shameless racist brutality, but also the heroism of those who insisted that he did not die in vain. Above all his story is our history.

Elliott Gorn teaches history at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of “Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till.”