Emmett Till

Emmett Till

Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till (July 25, 1941 – August 28, 1955) was an African-American teenager from Chicago, Illinois who was brutally lynched in a region of Mississippi known as the Mississippi Delta near the small town of Drew in Sunflower County. His murder was one of the key events that energized the nascent American Civil Rights Movement. The main suspects for the crime were acquitted. Emmit's mother then had an open cascate funeral to let all know how her son was abbused

Events

Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Carthan Till (Bradley, Mobley) and Louis Till. His mother was born to John and Alma Carthan in the small Delta town of Webb, Mississippi. When she was two years old, her family moved to Illinois. Emmett's mother largely raised him on her own; she and Louis had separated in 1942. Emmett Till's father was drafted into the United States Army in 1943 during World War II, and was executed by the U.S. Army for raping two Italian women and murdering a third.

In 1955, he was sent for a summer stay with his great uncle, Moses Wright, who lived in Money, Mississippi (a small town eight miles north of Greenwood).

Prior to his journey into the Delta, Emmett's mother cautioned him to "mind his manners" with white people. She told her boy not to fool with white people in Mississippi, "If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly."

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Bryant's Store in Money, Mississippi. This picture was taken in 2005, and the building still stands.

Till's mother understood that race relations in Mississippi were very different from those in Chicago. In Mississippi, over 500 blacks had been lynched since 1882, and racially motivated murders were still not unfamiliar, especially in the Delta where Till was going to visit. Racial tensions were also on the rise after the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end segregation in schools.

Till arrived on August 21; on August 24, he joined other teenagers as they went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to get some refreshments. The teens were children of sharecroppers and had been picking cotton all day. The market was owned by Roy Bryant and Carolyn Bryant, and mostly catered to the local sharecropper population. While in the store, Till allegedly whistled at, or openly flirted with, Carolyn Bryant and this action greatly angered her husband when he returned home several days later from an out-of-town trip.

There was no doubt that something had happened between Till and Carolyn Bryant when he and his cousin went inside the small Money grocery store owned by the Bryants. Carolyn Bryant later asserted that Till had grabbed her at the waist and asked her for a date. She said the young man also used “unprintable” words. He had a slight stutter and some have conjectured that Bryant might have misinterpreted what Till said. Others say that he could have been mildly retarded and any unexpected behavior on his part might easily have been misconstrued. Several black youths, all under 16, were reported to have been with Till in the store and according to one newspaper account, forced him to leave the store for being “rowdy.”

By the time twenty-nine-year-old Roy Bryant returned to Money from a road trip three days after his wife’s encounter with Till, it seemed that everyone in Tallahatchie County knew about the incident, every conceivable version, and Bryant decided that he and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, 40, would meet around 2:00 a.m. on Sunday to "teach the boy a lesson."

Lynching

At about 2:30 AM on August 28, Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till from his uncle's house in the small cotton town of Money, Mississippi. According to witnesses, they drove him to a weathered plantation shed in neighboring Sunflower County, where they brutally beat him until he was unrecognizable, gouged out an eye, then shot him with a .45 caliber pistol before tying a seventy-five pound cotton gin fan around Till's neck with barbed wire. This was to weigh down his body, which was dropped into the Tallahatchie River near Glendora, another small cotton town.

The brothers were soon under suspicion for the boy's disappearance and were arrested August 29 after spending the night with relatives living in Ruleville only several miles away from where the murder actually took place.

Both men first admitted they had taken the boy from his great-uncle's home but claimed they turned him loose the same night. Word got out that Till was missing and soon NAACP civil rights leaders Medgar Evers, the state field secretary; and Amzie Moore, head of the Bolivar County chapter, became involved, disguising themselves as cotton pickers and going into the cotton fields in search of any information that would help find the young Delta visitor.

After collecting laborers’ stories first hand, Amzie Moore, a Delta civil rights veteran and member of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership and the NAACP, observed it was apparent that “more than 2,000 families” were murdered and lynched over the years, with their bodies thrown into the Delta’s swamps and bayous (a much larger figure than the officially estimated "500" bodies).

Some believed that relatives of Till were hiding him out of fear for the youth’s safety. Or that he had been sent back to Chicago where he would be safe. Regardless, witnesses told the Sheriff that a person who sounded like a woman identified Till as “the one” after which the group drove away with Till.

Bryant and Milam claimed they later found out Till was not “the one” who allegedly insulted Mrs. Bryant, and swore to Sheriff George Smith they had released the young Chicago visitor. They would later recant and confess, after the trial ended.

In an editorial on Friday, September 2, Greenville journalist Hodding Carter, Jr. asserted that "people who are guilty of this savage crime should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," a brave suggestion for any Mississippi newspaper editor to make and remain out of harm's way, Carter included.

After they found his body, a Tutwiler mortuary assistant worked all night to prepare the body as best he could, so Mamie Till could bring Emmett's body back to Chicago.

The Chicago funeral home had signed an agreement saying that it would nail the casket shut and leave it so. When Till's mother asked that the casket be opened for her to see, the mortician declined, explaining his agreement that he would not open the casket, moving Mrs. Till to remove the nails herself, starting from the bottom up. She also opted to leave the casket open for the funeral because she wanted people to see how badly Till's body had been disfigured. News photographs of Till's mutilated corpse circulated around the country, notably appearing in Jet, drawing intense public reaction. Some reports indicate up to 50,000 people viewed the body.

Emmett Till was buried September 6 in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. The same day, Bryant and Milam were indicted in Mississippi by a grand jury.

Trial

When Mamie Bradley came to Mississippi to testify at the trial, she stayed in the home of Dr. T.R.M. Howard in the all-black town of Mound Bayou. Others staying in Howard's home were black reporters, such as Cloyte Murdock of Ebony, key witnesses, and Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan. Howard was a major civil rights leader and fraternal organization official in Mississippi, the head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL), and one the wealthiest blacks in the state.

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Picture taken in September 1955. Left to Right: Walter Reed( Willie Reed's grandfather), unidentified trial witness, Mamie Till Mobley (Till's mother), T.R.M. Howard, Rep. Charles Diggs of Michigan, Amanda Bradley (trial witness). Credit: Press-Scimitar Collection, Special Collections, University of Memphis Libraries.

On the day before the trial, Frank Young, a black farm worker, came to Howard's home. He said that he had information indicating that Milam and Bryant had help in their crime. Young's allegations sparked an investigation that led to unprecedented cooperation between local law enforcement, the NAACP, the RCNL, black journalists, and local reporters. The trial began on September 19. Moses Wright, Emmett's great-uncle, was one of the main witnesses called up to speak. Pointing to one of the suspected killers, he said "Dar he", or "there he is," to refer to the man who had killed his nephew. Knowing his life was in danger, he still managed to gather up enough courage to accuse the killers.

Another key witness for the prosecution was Willie Reed, an eighteen-year old high school student who lived on a plantation near Drew, Mississippi in Sunflower County. The prosecution had located him because of the investigation sparked by Young's information. Reed testified that he had seen a pickup truck outside of an equipment shed on a plantation near Drew managed by Leslie Milam, a brother of J.W. and Roy Bryant. He said that four whites, including J.W. Milam, were in the cab and three blacks were in the back, one of them Till. When the truck pulled into the shed, he heard human cries that sounded like a beating was underway. He did not identify the other blacks on the truck.

On September 23 the jury, made up of 12 white males, acquitted both defendants. Deliberations took just 67 minutes; one juror said they took a "soda break" to stretch the time to over an hour. The hasty acquittal outraged people throughout the United States and Europe, and energized the nascent Civil Rights Movement.

Aftermath of the Trial

Even during the trial, Howard, and black journalists, such as James Hicks of the Baltimore Afro-American, had named several blacks who had allegedly been on the truck near Drew including three employees of J.W. Milam: Henry Lee Loggins, Levi 'Too-Tight' Collins, and Joe Willie Hubbard. In the months after the trial, both Hicks and Howard called for a federal investigation into charges that Sheriff H.C. Strider had locked up Collins and Loggins in jail to keep them from testifying.

In a January, 1956 article in Look Magazine for which they were paid, J.W. Milam admitted to journalist William Bradford Huie that he and his brother had killed Till. They did not fear being tried again for the same crime because of the double jeopardy right. Milam claimed that initially, their intention was to scare Till into line by pistol-whipping him and threatening to throw him off of a cliff. Milam claimed that regardless of what they did to Till, he never showed any fear, never seemed to believe they would really kill him, and maintained a completely unrepentant, insolent and defiant attitude toward them concerning his actions. Thus, the brothers said they felt they were left with no choice but to fully make an example of Till. The story focused exclusively on the role of Milam and Bryant in the crime and did not mention the possible part played by others in the crime.

In February, 1956, Howard's version of events of the kidnapping and murder, which stressed the possible involvement of Hubbard and Loggins, appeared in a booklet, Time Bomb: Mississippi Exposed and the Full Story of Emmett Till by Olive Arnold Adams. At the same time, a still unidentified white reporter, using the pseudonym of Amos Dixon, wrote a series of articles in the California Eagle. The series put forward essentially the same thesis as Time Bomb but offered a more detailed description of the possible role of Loggins, Hubbard, Collins, and Leslie Milam. Time Bomb and Dixon's articles had no lasting impact in the shaping of public opinion. Huie's article became the most commonly accepted version of events.

In 1957, Huie returned to the story for Look Magazine in an article which indicated that local residents were shunning Milam and Bryant, and that their stores were closed due to lack of business.

Milam died of cancer in 1980, and Bryant died of cancer in 1990. Mamie (as Mamie Till Mobley) outlived them, dying at age 81 on January 6, 2003. That same year her autobiography "Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America" (One World Books, co-written with Christopher Benson) was published.

National media attention surrounding the young man’s death, the trial and the inevitable acquittal of Till’s killers, would have a broad effect on civil rights that no one could have imagined or predicted in becoming a key factor in the explosive year that launched the modern Civil Rights Movement.

Popular culture

The murder of Emmett Till was felt deeply by African-Americans, civil rights activists and many others. Artistic works drawing on the incident include the first play by eventual Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, poems by Langston Hughes and Audre Lorde, and a song by Bob Dylan called "The Death of Emmett Till."

The James Baldwin play "Blues for Mister Charlie" is also loosely based on the case.

Recent fictionalized accounts include two award-winning novels: Bebe Moore Campbell's Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) and Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle (1993).

The 2003 rap song "Through the Wire" by Kanye West uses the image of Till's mutilated face as a simile for West's physical appearance after a near-fatal car accident, demonstrating that after fifty years the murder is still firmly entrenched in the public memory.

The 2005 rap music video "Cadillacs On 22s" by David Banner shows Banner wearing a black T-shirt with the words "R.I.P. Emmett Till" Printed on it.

In 2005, the play The State of Mississippi and the Face of Emmett Till premiered in the south for the first time at Dillard University in New Orleans. The show, written by David Barr, was performed again in October (as The Face Of Emmett Till) with a different cast at Coppin State University.

In August 2005, a 38-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 49 north from Tutwiler to Greenwood, Mississippi was renamed in honor of Till.

In February 2006, the elementary school that Till had attended in Chicago (James McCosh Math & Science Academy) was renamed in his honor. At the renaming ceremony, plans for building an Emmett Till Museum on the school's grounds were discussed.

Recent investigations

In 2001, David T. Beito, associate professor at the University of Alabama and Linda Royster Beito, chair of the department of social sciences at Stillman College, were the first investigators in many decades to track down and interview on tape two key principals in the case: Henry Lee Loggins and Willie Reed. They were doing research for their biography of T.R.M. Howard. In his interview with the Beitos, Loggins denied that he had any knowledge of the crime or that he was one of the black men on the truck outside of the equipment shed near Drew. Reed repeated his testimony at the trial that he had seen three black men and four white men (including J.W. Milam) on the truck. When asked to identify the black men, however, he did not name Loggins as one of them. The Beitos also confirmed that Levi 'Too-Tight' Collins, another black man allegedly on this truck, had died in 1991.

In 1996, Keith Beauchamp started background research for a feature film he planned to make about Till's murder, and asserted that as many as 14 individuals may have been involved. While conducting interviews he also encountered eyewitnesses who had never spoken out publicly before. As a result he decided to produce a documentary instead, and spent the next nine years creating The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. The film led to calls by the NAACP and others for the case to be reopened. The documentary included lengthy interviews with Loggins and Reed, both of whom the Beitos had first tracked down and interviewed in 2001. Loggins repeated his denial of any knowledge of the crime.

On May 10, 2004, the United States Department of Justice announced that it was reopening the case to determine whether anyone other than Milam and Bryant was involved. Although the statute of limitations prevented charges being pursued under federal law, they could be pursued before the state court, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and officials in Mississippi worked jointly on the investigation. As no autopsy had been performed on Till's body, it was exhumed from the suburban Chicago cemetery where it was buried on May 31, 2005, and the Cook County coroner then conducted the autopsy. The body was reburied by relatives on June 4.

On August 26, 2005 the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi announced that the exhumed body had been positively identified as that of Emmett Till.

Possible defendants in the reopening of the case include Carolyn Donham, ex-wife of Roy Bryant, and Henry Lee Loggins, the now 82-year-old former plantation worker who is currently living in an Ohio nursing home. In March 2006, the federal investigation was closed although a state one was still a possibility.

See also

• Eyes on the Prize
• The Scottsboro Boys

References

• The Emmett Till Murder, definitive site on the case by Devery S. Anderson
• The Murder of Emmett Till. American Experience - Transcript and additional materials for PBS film. Accessed May 10, 2004.
• Maria Newman (May 10, 2004). U.S. to Reopen Investigation of Emmett Till's Murder in 1955. The New York Times. Accessed May 10, 2004.
• Gary Younge, The Guardian, 6 June 2005, "Justice at last?"
• Stephen Whitfield, A Death in the Delta (1988 book)
• Keith Beauchamp, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" (2004 documentary)
• M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, The Emmett Till Book (2005) ISBN 1-4116-3843-3
• M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited (2005) ISBN 1-4116-4102-7
• Body identified as Emmett Till, sciencedaily.com press release, August 26, 2005.
• David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, *Why It's Unlikely the Emmett Till Murder Will Ever Be Solved, History News Network
• David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, *Why the '60 Minutes' Story on Emmett Till Was a Disappointment, History News Network
• Christopher Metress, The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative (2002 book)
• Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, The Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (2003 book)

External links

• Early Civil Rights Struggles: The Murder of Emmett Till
• Crime Library: Mississippi Madness: The Story of Emmett Till
• NPR pieces on the Emmett Till murder
• "The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi" by William Bradford Huie, Look Magazine, 1956
• LookSmart - Emmett Till directory category
• Open Directory Project - Emmett Till directory category
• Yahoo! - Emmett Till directory category
• Emmett Till's grave at Burr Oak Cemetery
• Emmett-Till blog
• Emmett Till Math & Science Academy (Chicago)