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Emmett Till, Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement |
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In the string of lynchingsand murders of African Americans that ignited the civil rights movement, the slaying of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 was widely viewed as the worst.
The Lynching of Emmett Louis Till
The horrific death of a Chicago teenager helped spark the civil rights movement
In the summer of 1955, Mamie Till gave in to her son's pleas to visit relatives in the South. But before putting her only son Emmett on bus in Chicago, she gave him a stern warning:
"Be careful. If you have to get down on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly."
Emmett, all of 14, didn't heed his mother's warning. On Aug. 27, 1955, Emmett was beaten and shot to death by two white men who threw the boy's mutilated body into the Tallahatchie River near Money, Mississippi.
Emmett's crime: talking and maybe even whistling to a white woman at a local grocery store.
Emmett's death came a year after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Educationdecision outlawed segregation. For the first time, blacks had the law on their side in the struggle for equality. Emmett's killing struck a cord across a nation. White people in the North were as shocked as blacks at the cruelty of the killing. The national media picked up on the story, and the case mobilized the NAACP, which provided a safe house for witnesses in the trial of the killers. Emmett became a martyr for the fledgling civil rights movement that would engross the country in a few years.
Mamie Till spoke out about her son's death. She held an open-casket funeral for her son, so that the world could see "what they did to my boy." Emmett's face was battered beyond recognition and he had a bullet hole in his head. The body had decomposed after spending several days underwater.
Roy Bryant, whose wife Carolyn was the white woman at the store, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were tried for Emmett's murder and acquitted by a jury of 12 white men.
There are conflicting reports as to what Emmett said to Carolyn Bryant, who owned the store with her husband. By most accounts, Emmett and his cousin Curtis Jones, who was visiting from Chicago as well, were playing with other boys outside the store. Emmett pulled a picture of a white girl out of his wallet and boasted to the other boys that she was his girlfriend. The other boys seemed to think it was just bragging by a city boy from the North. But one boy suggested to Emmett go inside the store and talk to the white woman who was running the cash register, especially if he was so good with white women.
Emmett went inside, and by some accounts he whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who was 21 at the time. Others said he bought some gum and made a lewd suggestion to Bryant on the way out. Bryant testified at the trial that Emmett grabbed her and said, "Don't be afraid of me, baby. I been with white girls before."
In the segregated South, punishment for a black male who made a sexual suggestion a white woman was swift. Word got around about what had happened and Emmett's relatives suggested he get out of town as fast as possible.
He didn't leave fast enough. According to historian David Halberstam, Ron Bryant and Milam tracked Emmett down and pulled him from his uncle's house. The beat him but Emmett was unrepentant. So, they decided to kill Emmett to make an example of him. They took him to the river and made him strip down naked. "You still better than me?" Milam asked Emmett. "Yeah," the boy said. Milam shot him in the head. They tied Emmett's body to a cotton gin fan and dumped it into the river.
Unfortunately, Emmett's killing was only one of thousands of similar murders in the South, and his name is not well-known. But the case was an important turning point in America's civil rights struggle.
December 5, 1955:One hundred days after Emmett Till's murder, Rosa Parksrefuses to give up her seat on a city bus, launching the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott and the civil rights movement. The boycott will last 381 days.
Just months after Emmett Till's murder, Look magazine published "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi," in which Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam confessed to the crime.
January 6, 2003: Mamie Till Mobley dies of heart failure, at age 81. Her death comes just two weeks before The Murder of Emmett Till is to premiere nationally on PBS.
The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative
At 2:00 A.M. on August 28, 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, visiting from Chicago, was abducted from his great-uncles cabin in Money, Mississippi, and never seen alive again. When his battered and bloated corpse floated to the surface of the Tallahatchie River three days later and two local white men were arrested for his murder, young Tills death was primed to become the spark that set off the civil rights movement.
With a collection of more than one hundred documents spanning almost half a century, Christopher Metress retells Tills story in a unique and daring way. Juxtaposing news accounts and investigative journalism with memoirs, poetry, and fiction, this documentary narrative not only includes material by such prominent figures as Hodding Carter, Chester Himes, Eleanor Roosevelt, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eldridge Cleaver, Bob Dylan, John Edgar Wideman, Lewis Nordan, and Michael Eric Dyson, but it also contains several previously unpublished worksamong them a newly discovered Langston Hughespoemand a generous selection of hard-to-find documents never before collected.
Exploring the means by which historical events become part of the collective social memory, The Lynching of Emmett Till is both an anthology that tells an important story and a narrative about how we come to terms with key moments in history.
"[A] provocative compendium of accounts from black and white newspapers that telegraph the mixture of obfuscation and horror surrounding the case, as well as the poetry, memoirs and fiction that testify to its enduring importance."
Publishers Weekly
"[A]nthologizes the Till case: the murder, the trial, the newspaper coverage, the struggle the killing sparked between racists and rights activists, and the passing of the case into the realms of both history and myth."
The Washington Post
"[R]iveting...In compiling the facts of the case, editor Christopher Metress has presented a full and complete account of one of America's most brutal hate crimes."
Quarterly Black Review
In more than 100 documents covering nearly 50 years, Christopher Metress puts the reader in the courtroom and fixes the Emmett Till atrocity firmly in our memory. This is a must-read by historians, students, and those curious to see this crime as it was seen in 1955and as we must see it now.
Julian Bond, Chairman of the Board, NAACP
"The emotional power of Emmett Till's murder has never been stronger than in Christopher Metress's fascinating documentary narrative. Here are the facts as well as the myth. Here are the heroic lies told with the best intentions. Here are truths that have never been properly understood until now. Every American struggling to understand the mystery of race in America would do well to read this book."
Juan Williams, Senior Correspondent, NPR, author of Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965
Mourners pass Emmett Till's casket in Chicago on Sept. 3, 1955. His mother insisted on an open casket and a public viewing that drew tens of thousands.
Bob Dylan's - The Death of Emmett Till
People & Events: The Impact of Emmett Till's Murder
By 1955, African Americans across the country, including in the segregated South, had begun the struggle for justice. Emmett Till's murder was a spark in the upsurge of activism and resistance that became known as the civil rights movement. The sight of his brutalized body pushed many who had been content to stay on the sidelines directly into the fight.
Black Voters Murdered
Months before Emmett's death in 1955, two African American activists in Mississippi had been murdered. An NAACP field worker, the Reverend George Lee, was shot and killed at point blank range while driving in his car after trying to vote in Belzoni. A few weeks later in Brookhaven, Lamar Smith was shot and killed in front of the county courthouse -- in broad daylight and before witnesses -- after casting his ballot. Both were active in black voter registration drives. No one was arrested in connection with either murder.
Till a Catalyst
Emmett Till's death had a powerful effect on Mississippi civil rights activists. Medgar Evers, then an NAACP field officer in Jackson, Mississippi, urged the NAACP national leadership to get involved, and along with NAACP field workers Ruby Hurley and Amzie Moore, conducted a secret search for black witnesses willing to take the serious risk to come forward.
Witnesses
Other local leaders courageously stepped forward after the Till murder. Physician and civil rights leader Dr. T. R. M. Howard of the small, all-black Delta town of Mound Bayou was already known in Mississippi for his activism. Howard, whose life had been repeatedly threatened, had armed bodyguards to protect him and his family. During the trial, Howard extended this protection to the black witnesses and to Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Mobley. After they testified, Howard, Medgar Evers and other NAACP officials helped the black witnesses slip out of town.
Death List
After Till's murderers, J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were acquitted, Howard boldly and publicly chastised FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover: "It's getting to be a strange thing that the FBI can never seem to work out who is responsible for the killings of Negroes in the South." In December 1955, after the national black magazine Ebony reported that Dr. Howard was on the Ku Klux Klan's death list and that several others on the list had already been killed, Howard sold most of his property in Mound Bayou, packed up his family and relocated to Chicago.
Momentum for a Movement
For Dr. Howard and others, the immediate impact of the acquittal of Till's killers was increased repression in Mississippi. Still, the momentum and mobilization that followed Till's murder fed the next stage of the movement. One hundred days after Emmett's death, a black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus and was arrested for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws. The Women's Democratic Council, under Jo Ann Robinson, called for a citywide bus boycott and asked a young, 26-year-old minister to help.
His name was Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
People & Events: Mamie Till Mobley (1921-2003)
In 1955, Mamie Till was unwillingly thrust into American history. The murder of her son, Emmett, catapulted the quiet Chicago civil service employee into a lifetime of advocacy, starting with seeking justice for the death of her son.
Early Years
She was born Mamie Carthan on November 23, 1921, in a small town near Webb, Mississippi, the only child of John and Alma Carthan. Ironically, she was born just two miles from the town of Sumner, where the trial of her son's killers would one day be held.
Her father wanted to leave the South and the cotton fields, and made plans soon after his daughter was born. He found work in the small industrial town of Argo, Illinois, near Chicago, at the Argo Corn Products Refining Company.
Alma Carthan joined her husband in January 1924, and brought their two-year-old daughter Mamie with her. They settled in a predominately black enclave in Argo where everyone knew each other. But Mamie's world was shattered at age 13 when her parents divorced. A bright girl and a good student, Mamie buried herself in her schoolwork.
A Strict Mother
Mamie's mother, a member of the fundamentalist Church of God in Christ, was strict. She had high hopes for her only child. "In my day, the girls had one ambition -- to get married. Very few kids finished high school," Mamie would recall. But her parents encouraged her to finish. Mamie was the first black student to make the A Honor roll, and the fourth black student to graduate from the predominately white Argo Community High School.
"My mother always had been a firm disciplinarian and she kept me to a rigid code of conduct," she said. "I wasn't allowed to run around with the gang and I had to give strict account for my whereabouts outside of school." Every year, Mamie would return to Mississippi to visit relatives. She would spend the steamy summers with an aunt and socialize with other kids at church picnics.
Louis Till
When she turned 18, she met a fellow from Madrid, Missouri named Louis Till. He worked at the Argo Corn Company, was an amateur boxer, and was popular with many women. But Louis Till had his eye on Mamie. When they met, he took her to an ice cream parlor for her first banana split. Her parents disapproved, thinking the charismatic Till was "too sophisticated" for their daughter. At her mother's insistence, she broke off their courtship. But the persistent Till won Mamie's heart, and they married on October 14, 1940. Both were 18 years old.
Emmett
Nine months later, their only child, Emmett Louis Till, nicknamed "Bobo," was born at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. The boy was the apple of his mother and grandmother's eyes. Aside from a bout with polio at age five, after which Emmett would speak with a mild stutter, he was a healthy and happy boy.
Emmett would never know his father, who was shipped out to Europe as an Army private. Mamie and Louis Till separated in 1942. Three years later, Mamie received a letter from the Department of Defense informing her, without a full explanation, that Till was killed in Italy due to "willful misconduct."
By the early 1950s, Mamie and Emmett had moved to Chicago's South Side. Both of her parents had remarried and left Argo, her mother to Chicago and her father to Detroit. Mamie met and married Gene "Pink" Bradley, but they divorced two years later.
A Terrible Burden
In 1955 Mamie decided to take a long-awaited vacation to Nebraska to visit relatives. She wanted her son to go with her. But Emmett was set on joining his cousins and spending the end of the summer in Mississippi. When she put her son on a Southbound train, it was the last time she would see him alive.
When her boy was killed, Mamie turned to the strength of her family and faith. "When I began to make the announcement that Emmett had been found and how he was found, the whole house began to scream and to cry. And that's when I realized that this was a load that I was going to have to carry. I wouldn't get any help carrying this load."
Horrified by the mutilation of her son's body yet determined that it would not happen again, Mamie made a stunning decision -- Emmett would have an open casket funeral. "I think everybody needed to know what had happened to Emmett Till," she said. Some 50,000 people streamed in to view Emmett's corpse in Chicago, with many people leaving in tears or fainting at the sight and smell of the body.
International Firestorm
After two of her son's killers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, were acquitted of murder, the Till case became an international cause clbre with news articles and editorials across the country and in Europe condemning the verdict and Mississippi. With the international firestorm, the NAACP, black leaders and Mamie were hopeful that Milam and Bryant would at least be punished for kidnapping. But just weeks before the grand jury met, Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland, a staunch segregationist and plantation owner, dug up information on Louis Till's past and leaked it to the press.
The U.S. Army had executed Private Till in Italy in 1945 for raping two Italian women and killing a third. The insinuation: Emmett's behavior ran in the family. On November 9, 1955, a Mississippi grand jury refused to indict Milam and Bryant on kidnapping charges. Both men were free.
No Government Help
Mamie turned to the federal government for help, to no avail. She had not received her ex-husband's Army records, and she asked how a senator, but not a widow, receive that information? She also tried to meet with President Dwight Eisenhower, but he refused. And FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover wrote in a memo: "There has been no allegation made that the victim [Emmett Till] has been subjected to the deprivation of any right or privilege which is secured and protected by the Constitutionand the laws of the United States..."
Taking the Fight to the People
Thousands of letters protesting the Mississippi verdict poured into the White House. Mamie took her fight to the people and gave speeches to overflowing crowds across the country. Blacks were galvanized. Membership in the NAACP soared. African Americans were angered by Emmett's killing and the injustice, and moved by the loss of an only child to a young mother. Those in the trenches of the civil rights movement realized they had to move their fight boldly to the front lines. In December 1955, Rosa Parksrefused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery city bus and was arrested for violating Alabama's bus segregation laws. Soon after, a 26-year-old minister, Martin Luther King Jr., called for a city-wide bus boycott. The civil rights movement was officially born.
Renewed Interest
More than thirty years passed before Emmett Till's story would find renewed national interest, becoming the subject of scholarly research and publication. Filmmaker Stanley Nelson interviewed Mamie, other family members, journalists, and eyewitnesses who remembered what had happened in Mississippi so long ago, and by 2002, Mamie was working on her own memoir. But in a sad turn of events, just two weeks before the national television premiere of The Murder of Emmett Till, Mamie Till Mobleydied of heart failure in a Chicago hospital. She was 81 years old.
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