Remembering Emmett Till

In August of 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till took the train from Chicago to the cotton rich Mississippi delta to spend the last few days of summer vacation with his Uncle. About eight in the evening of Wednesday, August 24, 1955, he entered a grocery store in the small town of Money, Mississippi. The few eyewitness accounts differ, so we will never know the details of what happened. Some reports say that because Emmett has been bragging about his friendships with white girls in Chicago, his southern cousins dared him to go into the grocery and say something to the 21-year-old white woman working the register alone. One cousin, who was with Emmett that night, denied that they had dared him.

What happened will always be disputed. According to some accounts Emmett said nothing until he was leaving the store. Then he turned and said goodbye to the woman behind the counter. He may have stuttered. The boy had polio when he was younger and had struggled with stuttering in the years after his illness. He may have whistled. His mother had taught him to whistled if he found himself stuttering. Whistling apparently stopped the stuttering and made it possible for Emmett to get his words out. Some reports say that outside the building as Emmett was walking away he gave a wolf-whistle that was heard by some African American men playing checkers on the porch.

Carolyn Bryant, the woman behind the counter is now sixty-eight years old. She refuses to talk to reporters. She did tell a story under oath when her husband and his half brother were being tried for the murder. Before she spoke, the Judge ordered the jury out of the courtroom, on the grounds that whatever Emmett Till had said or done to Carolyn Bryant, it could not be a justification for his murder. Carolyn Bryant told her version of the events to the court with the jury out of the room.

Today there is no official trial transcript of what she said. None was preserved by the state of Mississippi. All that is left are newspaper accounts. The Jackson Mississippi State Times reported her testimony this way:

At about eight o’clock a Negro man came into the store and went to the candy case. I walked up to the candy counter and asked what he wanted. I gave him the merchandise and held out my hand for the money. He caught my hand in a strong grip and said ‘How about a date baby.’ I turned around and started to the back of the store, but he caught me at the cash register. He put both hands on my waist from the side. He said, "What’s the matter baby, can’t you take it. You needn’t be afraid." He said he had been with white women before. Then another Negro came in and dragged him out of the store by his arm. He said goodbye. I went out to the car and got a pistol from under the from seat. He was still standing on the porch, and he whistled.

That week Carolyn Bryant’s 24-year-old husband, Roy, was on a trip to Texas to deliver shrimp. According to an account published in Look magazine, Mrs. Bryant told a woman friend, and they decided to keep the incident from their husbands. According to this account, when Roy Bryant got back from Texas on Friday an African American told him a story about what had happened. Roy asked Carolyn and she confirmed the story.

At 2:00 A.M. Sunday morning Roy Bryant and his 36-year-old half brother J.W. Milam, drove to the cabin where Emmett Till was staying with his Uncle. According to them, there was no one else with them in the truck. According to Emmett Till’s uncle someone else was in the cab of the truck. This someone else was had a voice like a woman and said "That’s him," when Bryant and Milam took Emmett out to the cab of the truck.

They drove off with the boy. According to the story they told a reporter from Look Magazine, Bryant and Milam intended only to frighten and beat Emmett Till. They drove around that August night looking for a bluff on the Mississippi river where they planned to whip the 14-year-old with a colt .45 pistol, and scare the boy by leading him think they were going to throw him in the Mississippi.

They said they could not find the bluff and after three hours they gave up and drove to Milan’s house where they smashed Emmett across the head with the pistol. Then they left the house and drove to the Progressive Cotton Ginning Company. They got a discarded fan, three feet high weighting about 75 pounds. They drove to an isolated spot on the Tallahatchie river. Here they made 14-year-old Emmett Till remove his clothing. They shot him in the head with the pistol. Using Barb-wire they tied the gin fan around the boy’s neck and rolled him into the water. They took his clothing home and burned it.

Other witnesses dispute some of the details of this story. Two African Americans testified at the trial that they saw Till being driven into J.W. Milan’s barn and heard human screams coming from the barn. These witnesses said that they saw two African American men holding Till in the back of the bed of the truck to keep him from escaping and that later they saw the truck leave the barn with something in the back covered by a tarp. Some witnesses say that there were four, not two white men in the cab of the truck.

The body was discovered, with the feet floating up out of the water, on August 31. Several terrible deaths of black people occurred in Mississippi during this time. Most of these were ignored by the national press. However the press did focus a great deal of attention on the killing of Emmett Till. The story was told on the front page of newspapers throughout the nation.

"Negro Youth, Kidnaped, Slain in Mississippi"

"Negro, 14, Called Insulter, is Pulled from River Dead"

"Muddy River Gives up Body of Brutally Slain Negro Boy"

In 1955 Myrlie Evers was helping her husband Medgar Evers who the NAACP staff person in Jackson, Mississippi. Later she said:

I never completely understood what it was that made the murder of Emmett Till so different from the ones that had preceded it. In part, I supposed it was his youth. Medgar was convinced that the existence of our office in Jackson and the enormous efforts of the NAACP to get out the news made a tremendous difference. . . . It was the murder of this fourteen-year-old out-of-state visitor that touched off the worldwide clamor and cast the glare of a world spotlight on Mississippi’s racism.

Emmett Till’s family was able to intervene and stop a local sheriff from burying the child in a Mississippi grave. The body was shipped by train back to Chicago, where a three-day open coffin viewing was held. "Let them see what they have done to my boy," said Emmett’s mother. Photos of the boy’s distorted face appeared in newspapers across the nation.

Roy Bryant and his half brother were arrested and charged with murder. According to some reports, it was the first time in Mississippi history that two white men had ever been arrested and tried for the murder of a black man. The trial lasted a week, from Monday, September 19, to Friday, September 23. During the trial there were rumors that two back men had witnessed the killing and were being hidden in a jail in another town so that they could not be called to testify.

Seventy reporters and thirty photographers came from all over the world to cover the trial. Black reporters were required to set in a segregated area, and were searched each day when they entered the court room. Whites were not searched. The defendants sat with their wives and their little children during the trial.

The jury of twelve white men deliberated for an hour and seven minutes. They would have come back sooner, one report said, but they needed time to finishing drinking their cokes. The verdict was not guilty. Bryant and Milam lit up cigars after the verdict was announced. A few months later both men freely confessed to a reporter from Look Magazine that they had killed Emmet Till, knowing that having been found not guilty they could not be tried for murder again. Grand juries refused to indict the men for kidnaping.

After 1955 Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley, completed her college degree in the late 1950s. In 1975 she received her Master’s degree. She spent her working life as a teacher in the Chicago public school system. Although she remarried, Emmett was her only biological child. She died last Monday afternoon in Chicago. She was 81 years old.

Now more than 47 years later, what meaning can we give to the death of her son? Three major events started the Great Civil Rights movement of the 20^th century. One was Brown vs the Board of Education, argued before the Supreme Court in 1954 by Thurgood Marshall. Another was Rosa Park’s decision to refuse to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama in December 1955. The third event was the worldwide outrage of the murder of Emmett Till in September of 1955. One newspaper quotes Rosa Parks as saying "I thought of Emmett Till, and when the bus driver ordered me to move to the back and I just couldn’t move." In the simplest terms, the story of Emmett Till tells us that in 1955 in Mississippi a black child could be killed for whistling at a white woman and the killers could go free and be cheered by their white neighbors.

A few people have tried to go deeper. Writing in the 1960s, James Baldwin spoke of trying to understand the killers:

In life, [he wrote] obviously, such people baffle and terrify me and, with one part of my mind at least, I hate them and would be willing to kill them. Yet with another part of my mind, I am aware that no man is a villain in his own eyes. Something in man knows—must know—that what he is doing is evil; but in order to accept the knowledge the man would have to change. What is ghastly and really almost hopeless in our racial situation now is that crimes we have committed are so great and so unspeakable that the acceptance of this knowledge would lead, literally to madness. The human being, then, in order to protect himself, closes his eyes, compulsively repeats his crimes, and enters a spiritual darkness which no one can describe.

But if it is true, and I believe it is, that all men are brothers, then we have the duty to try to understand this wretched man; and while we probably cannot hope to liberate him, begin working towards the liberation of his children.

James Baldwin believed that hope lies in our ability to liberate our children from our hate and the hate of our ancestors.

I wondered what happened to the children of the killers. The reporter from Look magazine went back to Mississippi a year after the Till murder to talk again with the killers, who had openly confessed to him. The reporter discovered that Blacks had refused to buy anything at a small town grocery stores own by the Milam-Bryant family. The stores had to be closed and boarded up.

Milam tried to turn to farming. He had great difficulty finding land to rent and great difficulty finding a bank that would give him a loan to start a cotton crop. He, his wife and his children were forced to move into a sharecrop house with no running water.

Roy Bryant could not find a job. He went to welding school, and feed his family off of the $100 in assistance he received from the government. In the 1960s Roy Bryant became a deputy sheriff. Carolyn Bryant divorced Roy in 1979 and he died in 1994. J.W. Milam has also died.

I do not know what has happened to the children of these two men. While others still wonder about the details about what really happened to Emmett Till, I wonder what happened to the offspring of the killers. What are they like today? Have they been liberated from the hate of their fathers?

Mamie Till Mobley remained active in civil rights all her life. In the summer of 2000 Raynard Johnson, a seventeen-year-old black man, was found hanging in a tree in Mississippi. Although the death was ruled a suicide, local blacks believe that Johnson was lynched because of his open relationships with two white girls. One thousand marchers protested the killing. Mamie Till Mobley came down from Chicago to join the protest march in Mississippi. "I am here" she said "because I need to be here."

Now she is gone. It is up to us to remember the story. It is up to each of us to try to free the next generation from hate. If it us true, and I believe it is, that all people are sisters and brothers, then we have the duty to try to understand what is going on inside the heads of the people who commit these terrible hate crimes. While we may not be able to change the adults, what we learn may help us in the liberation of children from chains of ethnic and racial and sexual hatred. That is my hope for this new century.

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