Emmett Till and his mother Mamie dressed up for Easter the spring before his death. |
It may have been pure coincidence. Probably was.
And I don’t remember his name
being mentioned through the long program
that afternoon that I watched with rapt attention on my folk’s black and white TV. But when the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. mounted that stage in front of the Lincoln Memorial cast his eye on the
hundreds of thousands stretching as far as the eye could see down the National Mall and strode to the microphone to address the March on Washington for Jobs and Justice on
August 28, 1964, the spirit of a 14 year old boy must have been there.
Young Emmett Till, a Chicago boy spending the summer with
his Mississippi relatives, was just
14 years old when on the same date in 1955 he was dragged from their home under
the cover of night and brutally murdered by a mob. After his mother bravely insisted that his horribly abused body lying in a Chicago casket be publicly displayed and photographed, Emmett’s death sparked an
outraged national movement that helped end decades of consequence free lynching of Black
people across the South.
Till's memory was revived and linked to the killing of Trayvon Martin and young un-armed black victims of recent police shootings contributing to the Black Lives Matter movement. |
Today, exactly sixty years later, and
after mob lynching has virtually disappeared, his spirit
reminds us that the extra-judicial
executions of unarmed Black boys,
young men by police which is epidemic across
the country, is just the new face of
lynching. Emmett Till, Trayvon Martin, Michael
Brown, hundreds of other—two a week
killed by police—all victims of a pervasive
national racism that continues
to fester.
Young
Emmett’s family history mirrored that of many others who came North from the Deep South as part of the decades long Great Migration of impoverished Blacks to the economic promise of
the big cities of the Midwest.
Mamie Carthan was born in 1921, the daughter of a sharecropper in Webb, Mississippi, a
tiny town in the Mississippi Delta
Cotton Belt. While she was still a
small child the family moved to Alton in
Southern Illinois which was
attracting so many Southern refugees it was sometimes called Little Mississippi.
Coming of
age in the Depression, Mamie married
young to another former southerner, Louis
Till in 1940 after moving to Argo, now
part of the Village of Summit, in
Chicago’s west Suburbs with her
mother Alma. The couple lived with Alma. Louis drank
and became increasingly abusive. Shortly after Emmett was born on July 25,
1941 the couple split up. After the
divorce Louis returned to their former home and tried to kill Mamie.
A judge
gave him a choice between the Army
and prison. Louis entered the service in 1942 and
died in 1945, somewhat mysteriously executed by the military for willful misconduct. Emmett was raised by his single mother with
assistance from his maternal grandmother
and a network of other relatives who had come north.
During
the war Mamie had gotten a good job as a typist. Along with a monthly stipend sent home by the Army from Louis and occasional transmissions of money he had allegedly
won in poker games and by sharing a
home with her mother and step father, Mamie
was finally able to get ahead, at least monetarily and even save several
hundred dollars.
Emmett,
nicknamed Bobo at birth, despite
being named for a favorite uncle,
survived and healed from injuries sustained
in his delivery when doctors at Cook County Hospital misused forceps in his breach delivery. He was
doted on by both his mother and grandmother.
By 1946
Emmett was a lively kindergartener in
an Argo school. During that school year an aunt and uncle from Mississippi arrived in town and moved nearby. Their son and Emmett’s cousin Wheeler Parker, Jr. became the boy’s best friend and inseparable companion despite a two year age gap. Because he was so poorly educated in the
Delta young Wheeler was set back to Emmett’s class in school.
In the
summer of ’47 Emmett was stricken by dreaded polio. His mother and
grandmother feared for his life or that he would be confined to an iron lung. Despite being held in quarantine at the Cook
County Contagious Disease Center
and then again at home for more than 30 days, Emmett eventually recovered. The disease did leave him with a bad speech impediment and he stuttered the rest of his life. He also suffered from swollen and weakened ankles.
Grandma
Alma re-married and moved to Chicago
leaving Mamie alone in Argo to raise her growing son. She continued to work hard as a typist for
various government agencies—the Army Signal Corps, Veteran’s Administration, and Social
Security Administration all the while putting money away for Emmett’s college education.
In 1950
Alma moved to Detroit where her
father lived to re-establish a relationship with him and give Emmett a father
figure. She also frankly hoped to find a
new husband with a good steady job in the auto
industry or one of the Motor City’s other
then booming industries. She got a job
with the Armed Forces Ft. Wayne
Induction Center, which was so busy providing draftees for the Korean War that
she worked long hours, often seven days a week.
Nine year old Emmett willingly stepped up to take on household responsibilities to help his
hard working mother out.
Mamie
began dating auto worker Pink Bradley who
also got along well with Emmett. But the
boy grew increasingly home sick for Argo and particularly for his best friend
cousin. Reluctantly Mamie let him return
there to live with his aunt and uncle in the house next to the one he grew up
in. She married Pink in 1951 in Detroit
with her son and mother in attendance.
After a short while with the coupe, Emmett returned once again to Argo.
Not long
after the wedding Pink was laid off at Chrysler. Mamie had been returning to Argo monthly to
visit Emmett and was beginning to fear that he would make a life without
her. The couple decided to return to
Illinois. Grandma Alma bought a two flat in Chicago on South St. Lawrence Street and the family
moved into the second floor. Pink got a
job at the Argo Corn Products plant
and Mamie returned to the Social Security Administration.
The
family’s domestic bliss was short lived. Pink was unfaithful. Mamie threw him out, reconciled once, and
split with him for good in 1953.
Despite
this set back Emmett was flourishing into a lively, spirited young man popular
with his classmates despite his speech problems. He enjoyed a close relationship with his
mother and grandmother and the company of his cousins. Due to Mamie’s hard work the family thrived
modestly, an example of the successful upward mobility of her generation of
Black migrants to the north. They were
firmly settled into a community and had established a comfortable church home, a vital part of urban Black life.
Mamie
took a new, responsible job with the U.
S. Air Force in charge of confidential files and began a lasting
relationship with a new man, a barber
named Gene Mobley who would later
become her husband. Mobley developed a
strong relationship with the boy
Emmett
really enjoyed dressing up for church and other occasions. He can be seen bursting with pride in family
photos in his snappy fedora, spotless
white shirt, tie, and jacket. He had grown into stocky but muscular
young teenager, weighing about 150 pounds and standing 5’ 4” in the summer of
1954 when he was 14.
He had
grown up all of his life hearing stories about life in Mississippi. To a boy who loved the outdoors and had a
sense of adventure those stories sounded irresistible—fishing and swimming in local ponds
and streams, climbing trees, roaming the fields
and scrub woods barefoot and
with little adult superstition. When his cousin Wheeler announced plans to
spend the summer down south with relatives, Emmett begged for a chance to go
with him. Reluctantly, his mother
agreed. But before he left she gave him
a stern lecture about how different and dangerous the South could be and how he
would have to watch out how he acted around White folk. Emmett assured
her he understood. But he didn’t. He couldn’t have.
In August
Emmett and Wheeler accompanied Wheeler’s grandfather, and Mamie’s uncle Moses Wright, a preacher and sharecropper on a visit to tiny Money, Mississippi.
Emmett
arrived in Money on August 21. Three
days later he and another cousin, Curtis
Jones skipped church where Wright was preaching to idle with other boys
around Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, a typical rural village
store. What happened next is shrouded in
controversy and mystery.
All agree
that Emmett entered the store where 21 year old Carolyn Bryant, wife of
the owner, was tending store. Some say Emmett wolf whistled at her. Others
that he whistled as he ordered bubble
gum in frustration over his
stutter. Carolyn would later claim that
Emmett had “come on to her” and asked her for a date. She claimed to be intimidated and menaced
by someone she described as nearly a full grown man.
The boys
departed the store. Carolyn ran outside
and obtained a revolver from a car and all of the boys quickly scattered. Over the next few days she spread the tale
which seemed to grow more menacing
with each retelling.
Carolyn’s
husband Roy returned from a fishing
trip on August 27 and first hear Carolyn’s tale.
In the
early morning hours of August 28 Roy Bryant, his 36-year-old half-brother J. W. Milam, and a third man after a long evening of drinking and raving about the
incident, drove to Moses Wright’s isolated sharecropper cabin. They entered the home, occupied by eight
people, rousing the house and flashing a pistol. They demanded to know, “the boy who did the
talking.” Unsure of what was meant,
Emmett Till said it was him. Threatening
to shoot him on the spot the men ordered him to dress. Moses was ordered to tell no one about the
visit. His distraught wife retrieved all
of the family’s cash and offered to pay the men to leave the child alone. They dragged Emmett away. He was never seen alive again.
They
loaded the boy into the car and took him to a barn at a nearby plantation where they pistol whipped him unconscious. Then they
loaded him into the back of a pick-up
truck and apparently roamed the county trying to decide what to do with
him, stopping to administer more beatings if they heard him stir. At some point Emmett was shot. The men drove by the
Bryant store where by some accounts they showed
the body to a Black man saying, “This is what happens to smart niggers.”
It was past dawn when the men stopped at a cotton gin and stole a 70 pound fan blade.
They drove to an isolated spot along the Tallahatchie River where they weighted Till’s body with the blade
and tossed him in the river. He may, or
may not have still been alive at the time.
Moses
Wright searched the next morning for his missing nephew but feared notifying
authorities. Another relative called Leflore County Sheriff George Smith to report a kidnapping. He also called Mamie in Chicago.
It did
not take Sherriff Smith long to locate and question Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam
who readily admitted that they had taken Till and beaten him to “teach him a
lesson” but claimed to have released him alive and able to walk away at
Bryant’s store. They were confident that
this was both reasonable and justifiable and that no white officials would take action
against them. Smith, however, did charge
the men with kidnapping undoubtedly
knowing that no jury would convict them.
Without a body, which they were sure would never turn up, they had
nothing to fear.
The Black
community quietly scoured the area for Till.
Medgar Evers, Field Secretary of the state NAACP arrived in disguise as a cotton picker
to join the search and conduct his own investigation.
Till's abused and mutilated body, pulled from a river three days after the murder, was unrecognizable. |
On August
28 two boys fishing along the river discovered Emmett Till’s nude body. His face was an unrecognizable pulp. He had
been shot behind one ear and beaten over much of his body. The fan blade had been tied around his neck
by barbed wire that bit deep into
his flesh. After three days the body was
also badly bloated. A silver ring inscribed L. T. and May 25, 1943 he
was known to be wearing was found on his finger.
Moses
Wright identified the body. Till’s body
was never turned over to the coroner for
a post mortem examination. It was packed in ice and destined for a speedy
local burial. Mamie had to intercede with all of her force to have the body released and
shipped by rail to Chicago where it
was taken to the funeral home of A. A. Sammy Rayner, an important community leader and rising political star.
Mamie
insisted on viewing the body to make a positive
identification. She was nearly
overcome by the stench, which was
reported detectable up to two blocks
away. She was also horrified by the mutilated corpse. She determined then and there to have an open viewing so the world could see what had happened to
her beloved son. A special glass topped coffin was ordered to
facilitate the public viewing. She made
sure that gruesome photographs were
clearly taken of the body.
Mamie Till grieves at her son's glass top casket at his Chicago funeral. |
Down South
after the first three paragraph story had appeared in the local paper, the
story quickly spread as did public outrage at the senseless brutality against a
young boy. Even some white’s admitted horror and sympathy as details emerged.
The governor of Mississippi
even wrote to the national NAACP pledging his backing for a full
investigation. NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins wasted
no time in calling Till’s death a lynching and charging that Mississippians
strove to maintain white supremacy
through murder.
Up north Mayor Richard Daley and Illinois Governor William Stratton, a Republican, both demanded an
investigation. After plenty of advance
publicity, including the brutally provocative photos of the body published in
the Chicago Daily Defender and
nationally in Jet Magazine,
thousands lined up to view the body at the funeral home.
Coverage
in the South began to change from initial sympathy for the victim. False
accounts of riots at the funeral were published as were rumors that armies of enraged Blacks were arming
themselves in Chicago and preparing to descend of the state. Bryant and Milam were pictured in their
military uniforms and lauded as veterans
and family men. Carolyn Bryant was held up as a model of
Southern womanhood—and also noted for her beauty.
The case
was now in the hands of Tallahatchie
County Sheriff Clarence Strider because the body was found in his jurisdiction. He had originally said that a good case could
be made against Bryant and Milam, but after the exaggerated reports from the
north surfaced he claimed to take seriously local press accounts that Till may have survived and been spirited
away in secret back to Chicago and that the body found in the river was not his
but one stolen from a funeral home by outside
agitators.
Despite
this a Grand Jury actually indicted Bryant and Milam for
murder. Although the Northern press
seemed impressed, the local prosecutor
knew that getting a conviction of white men for the murder of a Black was
virtually impossible.
Reporters
swarmed the tiny County Seat at Sumner, village so insignificant that it had only one rooming house. Reporters had to find hotel accommodations miles away.
Mamie and Michigan Congressman
Charles Diggs did not even have that option. They had to stay miles away at the home of Dr. T. R. M. Howard, a prominent Black businessman, surgeon, and civil rights
leader in Mound City. His home had to be put under 24 hour guard.
The trial
began speedily enough in September. The
day before it began the prosecution learned of two witnesses to Till’s
beatings, Levi “Too Tight” Collins
and Henry Lee Loggins, were Black employees of Leslie Milam, J. W.’s brother
who were willing to testify.
Conveniently, Sheriff Strider arranged for them to be arrested and held
in the Charleston, Mississippi
jail so that they could not testify.
Till's killers on trial--J. W. Milam and Carolyn's husband Roy Bryant. |
The trial
last five days in a broiling, segregated courtroom. Northern reporters were stunned that the jury was allowed to drink beer while hearing testimony and that
many of the white men attending the trial casually wore pistols strapped to their waists.
A
dramatic highlight of the trial came as Moses Wright stood and pointed to J. W.
Milam and identified him as one of the men who had abducted Till. It was the first time in Mississippi history
that a Black man had publicly accused
and identified a white in a trial.
It was an electrifying moment.
Mamie Till took the stand and gave a dramatic account of her warnings to
her son to behave around white folk down South.
The defense badgered her, trying to get her admit that she could not
identify the body. She was also painted
as cold and greedy for having a $400 life
insurance policy on her son—the kind that were peddled door-to-door in the Black community to cover burial expenses—an profiting from
falsely claiming his death.
Carolyn
Bryant was allowed to testify out of the hearing of the jurors. She maintained that she feared for her safety
as well as being shocked by Till’s alleged advances on her. Some court observers believe that transcripts or accounts of her testimony were smuggled to or shown to the jurors
anyway.
Mamie was
impressed by the summation of the prosecution, which she felt was a genuine
attempt to get a guilty verdict. But it
was not to be. After less than an hour
and a half of deliberation the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Some jurors later claimed that they knew the
men were guilty but felt that the required sentences for murder—the death penalty or life in prison—were too harsh for “killing a nigger.” Others
would maintain years later that they believed the defense claim that the body
was not Till’s.
A second
attempt to bring the two men to trial for kidnapping,
to which they had readily admitted, collapsed when the Grand Jury refused
to bring an indictment.
After the
second Grand Jury Dr. Howard had to pay for the relocation to Chicago for their
safety of Moses Wright; Willie Reed, a
young man who testified to seeing Milam enter the shed from which screams and
blows were heard; and a third witness who testified against Milam and Bryant.
Debate raged about the case for
weeks, not just in the United States, but around the world. The more condemnation rained down on
Mississippi, the more defiant local politicians and press became. Mississippi senators James Eastland and John C.
Stennis pressed the Army to release the supposedly sealed records of Louis
Till’s 1945 execution in Italy for willful misconduct—information Mamie Till
had long sought but been denied. It
turned out the elder Till was charged with two rapes. The revelations
stayed on Southern front pages for weeks, along with the assumption that Emmett
had inherited his father’s “innate
depravity” and was held up as proof the boy must have made moves against
Carolyn Bryant. The Black and Northern
press erupted in predictable outrage at the new smear.
In 1956, safe from any further
prosecution because of the Constitutional
protection against double jeopardy,
Milam and Bryant agreed to sell their story for $4000 each to Look
Magazine. The interview was
conducted by their defense attorneys, who claimed to have never heard the story
themselves, in the presence of writer William
Bradford Huie. Both men readily
admitted to the killing and not only expressed no regret but seemed
boastful. The more articulate Milam
shocked readers by his casual admission:
Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully;
I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers—in their place—I know how to
work ‘em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As
long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their
place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the
government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets
close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to
kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I
stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me,
and I just made up my mind. “Chicago boy,” I said, “I'm tired of ‘em sending
your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going to make an
example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.”
Needless to say the revelations
created yet another sensation—and revulsion in all but the most committed
racists. William Faulkner, Mississippi’s most revered literary icon heaped public
scorn on cowardly white men apparently so terrified by a boy that they had
to kill him.
Till and his case quickly became the
stuff of legend. He was frequently a character or referred to in novels, short stories, poems and
verse by important writers including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn
Brooks. James Baldwin, Audre Lorde,
and Toni Morrison. The case was an unstated inspiration for Harper Lee and her acclaimed novel To
Kill a Mocking Bird which was published the next year. He was the subject of several songs over the decades, notably Bob Dylan’s The Death of Emmett Till in 1962 to Emmy Lou Harris’s My
Name is Emmett Till in 2011.
On a practical level, the Till case
inspired stepped up demands for justice across the South. It is widely considered one of the touchstone moments of the Civil Rights Campaign era.
Mamie did marry Gene Mobley, adopted the name Till-Mobley, and drew some solace from
that lasting relationship. She went back
to school and became an admired teacher. But she dedicated her life to keeping the
memory of her son alive and to fighting for justice and equality. She died of heart failure in 2003, aged 81.
The Emmett Till Foundation that she began carries on her work and her
son’s legacy.
Despite being able to get away with
murder, Neither Bryant or Milam fared very well. Their farms and business were dependent on
the patronage and labor of black sharecroppers who refused to buy or work for
either of them. Banks refused to extend
the customary loans for seed for
their cotton crops. They lost their business and could not find
employment locally since black laborers would not work with them. Both relocated to Texas but found that their infamy
and troubles followed them. After
several years they returned to Mississippi and tried to live quietly. Milam worked as a heavy equipment operator until ill health caused his retirement. He had many brushes with the law for assault and battery, writing
bad checks, and using a stolen
credit card. He died of spinal
cancer in 1980, at the age of 61. Bryant worked as a welder until going nearly blind. He and Carolyn divorced and he
remarried. He opened another store in
Ruleville, Mississippi and was convicted in 1984 and 1988 of food stamp fraud. He blamed Emmett Till for ruining his
life. Bryant died of cancer in 1994, at
the age of 63.
As for
Carolyn who started it all. She
remarried and became Carolyn Bryant Donham
.
In 2003 filmmaker Keith
Beauchamp charged that she was actually present for and complicit in the murders with as many as 13 other individuals in
his documentary The Untold Story of
Emmett Louis Till. Those
allegations caused a new Grand Jury investigation of the case, which included
the exhumation of Tills body, which for the first time was autopsied and
positively identified by DNA. Grand Jury found no evidence against
Carolyn or anyone other than her husband and Milam. She sought a quiet life but never expressed
any remorse about the murder. In fact
she still seemed to regard Till’s death as a personal compliment to her beauty and virtue. She is the only survivor among the principals
in the case.
One final
odd note. After Emmett Till’s body was exhumed for that
2004 autopsy, it was re-interred at Bur
Oaks Cemetery in a new coffin. The
Cemetery operator claimed that the historic glass-topped casket viewed in 1955
was being preserved and would be
donated to museum. He even collected money for its
restoration. After a huge scandal involving digging up bodies, dumping them in a remote area, and
re-selling the plots was uncovered, investigators digging on the
property to retrieve and identify lost remains, unearthed a trench
filled with refuse including the original coffin. It was damaged, but its historic glass top
was intact. Eventually the coffin was
acquired by the Smithsonian
Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. where hopefully it will be preserved, restored, and put on public
display. Till’s grave and remains were
undisturbed during the hoopla.
This was horrible
ReplyDeleteThis was horrible
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for this account...I have attached it to the documentary 13th on Netflix and posted it on Facebook.
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for this detailed account. I linked it to the documentary on Netflix called 13th and sharedit on facebook, I hope you don't mind.
ReplyDeleteHard to find words for something this dispicable and tragic, but the changes it put in motion will assure it (and young Emmett) will never be forgotten.
ReplyDeleteBeen awhile since this story was written, but it might be worthy to Nye that on her death bed, his accuser said that the whole incident was a lie. He never even whistled or "came on to her" in the first place.
ReplyDeleteA boys was killed for nothingš
ReplyDelete