civil rights activist; victim
Personal Information
Born Emmett Louis Till, July
25, 1941, near Chicago, IL; beaten and shot to death, August 28, 1955,
in Tallahatchie County, MS; son of Louis Till (a soldier in the U.S.
Army) and Mamie Till Bradley (a clerk for the U.S. Air Force, then
Chicago public school teacher).
Education: McCosh Elementary School, Chicago, graduated seventh grade.
Career
Lynching victim. Till's murder by a white
mob in the summer of 1955 prompted a reexamination of race relations
and sparked the fledgling civil rights movement in the United States.
Life's Work
In August of 1955, a 14-year-old
Chicago youth was lynched while vacationing in Mississippi--just one of
more than 3,000 free blacks killed by a mob since the abolition of
slavery. But unlike the great majority of these victims, Emmett Till
did not die in obscurity. Less than a year and a half after the U.S.
Supreme Court's landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision that
outlawed segregation
in public schools and threatened the rigid Southern color line, his
death underscored for many the ruthless extremes to which some whites
would go to preserve segregation. Till's lynching therefore spurred
efforts to promote civil rights for people of color throughout the
United States.
Emmett Till was born near Chicago in 1941. His mother, Mamie,
had emigrated north from Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, her
birthplace, joining the approximately 100,000 other African Americans
from her home state who moved to Chicago during the 1940s. She married
Louis Till, who was originally from Missouri and served as a private in
the U.S. Army during World War II. The Tills divorced in 1943, and
Louis was executed by the Army in 1945 after being found guilty of
raping two Italian women and murdering a third in Civitavecchia, Italy, in June of 1944.
Mamie Till remarried a man named Bradley, was again divorced, and was working as a voucher
examiner in the U.S. Air Force Procurement Office in Chicago during the
summer of 1955. Taking a vacation that August, she wanted to rest
peacefully at home and decided to send her son to visit relatives back
in Mississippi.
Emmett,
nicknamed Bobo, was 14 years old that summer. He had just finished the
seventh grade at the all-black McCosh Elementary School on Chicago's
South Side. Between five-foot- four and five-foot-five and weighing 160
pounds, he was physically stocky and muscular. Self-assured despite a speech defect--a stutter that resulted from a bout with nonparalytic polio at the age of three--Bobo was a smart dresser with a reputation as a prankster and a risktaker.
But
when he got off the Illinois Central train in August of 1955 to spend
part of the summer vacation with his southern cousins, Till was
entering a world and society far different from the urban environment
he was familiar with. He had lived in the nation's second largest city
all his life but was now in the backwoods
of the South. Tallahatchie County, in the northwest corner of
Mississippi, was one of the most economically and culturally deprived
areas in the entire country. Its median per capita annual income of
$607 made it the sixth poorest county in the most impoverished state in the union. Tallahatchie
was overwhelmingly rural (77 percent of the population lived on farms),
poorly educated (the average adult had completed only 5.7 years of
school), nonwhite (two- thirds of its citizens were black), and
segregated (not one black was registered to vote). Most of the black
residents worked as sharecroppers or tenant
farmers on large cotton plantations. The largest town had a population
of only 2,629, and there was just one factory in the entire county.
But
even in this isolated section of the country, which largely resembled
the pre-Civil War South of nearly 100 years before, outside events were
threatening change. The U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of
Education ruling the previous summer had outlawed segregated "separate
but equal" public schools. The entire social structure of Southern
society--to this point based on white supremacy--appeared to be
threatened. According to Stephen J. Whitfield in A Death in the Delta,
southern white newspaper editors interviewed by U.S. News & World
Report concluded that opposition to the Brown decision was motivated by
fear of "eventual amalgamation of the races--meaning miscegenation,
intermarriage or whatever you want to call it." A front-page editorial
in the Jackson Daily News boldly stated that "Mississippi cannot and
will not try to abide by such a decision."
Almost
immediately, white "Citizens' Councils" began to form to forcefully
resist the decision and its implementation. Their intellectual godfather, Tom P. Brady, prophesied upcoming racial violence in his pamphlet Black Monday, predicting: "The supercilious, glib young negro, who has sojourned in Chicago or New York, and who considers the counsel of his elders archaic, will perform an obscene act, or make an obscene remark, or a vile overture or assault upon some white girl."
Emmett
Till did not talk or act like his Southern cousins. He did not hang his
head or add the customary "sir" when speaking with white storekeepers.
In contrast, he carried a photograph of a white woman in his wallet,
freely showing it to his newfound friends and relatives and boasting that she was his girlfriend in Chicago.
On
Wednesday evening, August 24, a week after his arrival at the home of
his great-uncle, Moses "Preacher" Wright, Till and seven other
teenagers piled into a 1946 Ford, then drove to Money, a nearby hamlet
consisting of three stores, a post office, school, gas station, cotton gin,
and a few hundred residents. Around 7:30 p.m. they joined about a dozen
other black youths congregating outside a grocery store owned and
operated by a white couple, Roy and Carolyn Bryant, that catered almost
exclusively to the local black field hands. Roy Bryant was away
trucking shrimp
to Texas, leaving his attractive, slight, 21-year-old wife in the
company of Juanita Milam, who was married to his half-brother, J. W.
Milam. What happened next is still being debated.
Apparently Till
continued talking to the other teens outside about his white Chicago
girlfriend. A couple of the local boys then began taunting him, daring
him to go inside the store and ask Carolyn Bryant for a date. While the
other black youths stayed outside and watched through the window, Till
entered the store, bought some gum, then grabbed Mrs. Bryant's hand and
asked her for a date. She broke free and ran to the living quarters at
the back of the store where her sister-in-law was staying. Realizing
the seriousness of the incident, one of Till's cousins rushed into the
store, pulling him away, while Mrs. Bryant ran to the Milams' car,
retrieved a gun, and returned to the store. As the crowd of black
teenagers drove off, Till, evidently determined not to lose face,
allegedly wolf whistled at her.
Testimony varies as to whether
Till actually whistled at Mrs. Bryant. His mother maintained that his
childhood bout with polio had impaired his ability to clearly pronounce
certain letters so that he sometimes made a whistling sound. One of his
southern cousins seconded his inability to articulate
certain speech. But two other cousins present at the scene contradicted
this by confirming that he had indeed wolf whistled at Mrs. Bryant.
What
is clear is that Carolyn Bryant was scared by Till who, though only 14,
was considerably bigger than she. Immediately recognizing the inherent
danger should the incident become known, she confided only in her
sister-in-law, making her promise not to tell either of their husbands
about it.
Unfortunately, this was not the case among local people
of color. For them, this shattering of the accepted Jim Crow
segregationist etiquette
was too exciting to keep under wraps and had to be shared with others.
When Bryant returned from Texas that Friday, a black neighbor told him
that a visiting Chicago boy had insulted his wife.
His sense of
honor threatened, Bryant informed his elder half- brother, J. W. "Big"
Milam, a 6-foot-2-inch, 235-pound, much- decorated World War II
veteran, of the offense. The two, sober
and armed with .45-caliber pistols, drove out to Moses Wright's home
late Saturday night, rousted the family from their beds and drove off
with young Till in the bed of their pickup truck, despite the pleas of
his great-uncle that Emmett was from the North and didn't know any
better.
Heading for a high 100-foot bluff overlooking the Mississippi River near the town of Rosedale, the two adults intended to scare
the younger Till by threatening to throw him into the river. But in the
darkness they could not find the spot. So they returned to Milam's home
at five in the morning, took Emmett to the toolshed and pistol-whipped him several times.
To their amazement, Till resisted, talking back to them and refusing to beg
for mercy. Instead, he bragged about the various white women with whom
he claimed to have had sexual relations. Infuriated, Milam decided to
kill Till to make an example of him to other like-minded Northern
blacks. He and Bryant drove the teen to the Progressive Ginning Company
near the town of Boyle, where they knew of a discarded large gin mill fan. The two made Till carry the heavy fan to the banks of the Tallahatchie River
and take off his clothes and shoes. Then Milam shot him once near his
right ear. Wiring the gin fan to his neck, they rolled his body into
the river and headed home to burn his clothing.
That same
morning, Sunday, August 28th, the Wrights reported the abduction to a
local sheriff, while one of the other visitors at their home phoned
Till's mother, Mrs. Bradley, in Chicago. She contacted the Chicago
police, and they in turn began phoning sheriffs in Mississippi. By noon
Sunday, Milam and Bryant were arrested. The two confessed to the
kidnapping, but claimed they had released Till because he was the wrong
person. Nevertheless, they were jailed on suspicion of murder.
Three
days later a fisherman found a badly decomposed corpse floating in the
Tallahatchie River. There was a bullet hole by the right ear, the head
appeared to have been severely beaten, and a gin fan was attached to
the neck. Only a ring on one of the fingers of the corpse permitted its
identification. Ironically, the naked body of Emmett Till was
discovered 15 miles from the birthplace of Mamie Till Bradley.
Harold
Clarence Strider, sheriff of Tallahatchie County, had wanted an
immediate burial. But a cousin had phoned Mrs. Bradley, who insisted
that the body be sent home to Chicago. She positively identified it as
her son and requested an open- casket funeral so all could bear witness
to Emmett's mutilated body.
Thousands
of black mourners filed past Till's casket in Chicago, and protest
meetings were held in several cities, including Cleveland, Detroit, Los
Angeles, Baltimore, and Youngstown, Ohio, clamoring for justice. An
estimated 20,000 people rallied in Harlem to demand that Congress pass
an anti- lynching bill.
Whitfield reported that initially,
sympathies in Mississippi ran against the two alleged murderers,
reacting to the slaying with "sincere and vehement expressions of outrage,"
according to the New York Times. Bryant and Milam were unable to find
an attorney to defend them. But in September, as outrage outside the
South intensified, Mississippians began to feel as if their state,
rather than the two individuals, were on trial by the rest of the
world. Outside agitators, particularly members of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which
condemned "the state of jungle fury" in Mississippi, incurred such resentment that white Mississippians began to draw together in defense of their own. All five lawyers in Sumner, the county seat where the trial took place, volunteered to represent the defendants pro bono (without pay).
Since
no black citizens were registered to vote in the county, none were
eligible for the jury. Nevertheless, 280 racially mixed spectators,
including black congressman Charles Diggs, Jr., from Michigan, packed
the segregated courtroom
each day. Approximately 70 reporters descended on sleepy Sumner, making
this one of the most publicized trials of the twentieth century. The
three major television networks picked up film daily to fly to New York
for airing on the nightly news.
Moses
Wright, who had been in hiding since the night of the abduction,
testified for the prosecution, positively identifying Milam and Bryant
as the abductors of his nephew. Mrs. Bradley also took the stand,
stating that her son, born and raised in Chicago, had no knowledge of
southern subculture and its unwritten
rules and had never before humbled himself to white people. Mrs.
Bryant, testifying with the jury absent, confirmed that a black with a
"Northern brogue" had come into her store, bought some gum,
propositioned her, and then wolf whistled after leaving.
Sheriff
Strider testified for the defense, claiming that no one had witnessed
the murder and denying that the body found was Emmett Till. After
hearing defense attorney John Whitten's challenge that "every last
Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men," the jury
deliberated for only 67 minutes before acquitting the two defendants on
September 23.
In keeping with Southern standards of justice at
that time, white violence against blacks was actually found to be
justified in such a case. Hugh Stephen Whitaker, interviewing the
jurors in 1962 for his master's thesis, found that they all believed
that Milam and Bryant had murdered Till, but concluded that since the
victim had insulted a white woman, they could not prosecute her husband
for defending her.
Reaction to the verdict was swift. The Northern media, black publications, and the international press were aghast, denouncing the decision. "All over people of every race and color read with shame and revulsion what had happened," Commonweal observed. By contrast, Southern newspapers tended to praise the jurors' verdict. That November, a grand jury failed to indict the two half-brothers on separate kidnapping charges.
The
Till lynching and trial was the first big racial story after the
Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision, making headlines
worldwide. It awakened African Americans from all corners of the nation
to the plight
of their people in the South, leading many to believe that continued
passivity would only help perpetuate segregation. Mrs. Bradley summed
up these feelings by telling a Cleveland audience in 1955, as quoted in
Whitfield's book A Death in the Delta: "The murder of my son has shown
me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be
the business of us all."
A black boycott
of the Bryant-Milam stores destroyed business, forcing the
half-brothers to sell out within 15 months of the trial. Desperate for
money, they sold their story to Southern writer William Bradford Huie
and Look magazine for $3,500. Guaranteed of no further prosecution,
they admitted to the murder in print, making their neighbors and
defendants appear silly. Peer pressure soon forced both families to
move out of Mississippi.
The trial awakened people from all regions of the United States to the undeniable
need for understanding and compromise between blacks and whites.
William Faulkner, an influential, Nobel Prize-winning author and
Mississippi native, reassessed his views on race relations, proclaiming
in a November 1955 address to the Southern Historical Association that
to "be against equality because of race or color, is like living in
Alaska and being against snow." Addressing his home state's racial paranoia
in his 1956 essay "On Fear," he asked "What are we Mississippians
afraid of?" On a national level, the Till case influenced passage of
the Civil Rights Act of 1957, establishing a Civil Rights Commission to
investigate the allegations of citizens claiming to be deprived of the
right to vote.
When Emmett Till stepped off the Illinois Central
train in Mississippi in August of 1955, he entered a thoroughly
segregated world. No civil rights workers were agitating for change in
the South. No voter registration campaigns had begun. No Freedom
Schools were yet established, and no Freedom Riders were driving
throughout the region in buses. But Till's murder and the subsequent
worldwide attention drawn to the trial and its aftermath started a
crack, albeit small, in the dam of Southern resistance to change.
His
memory lingers in the American imagination. His mother formed the
Emmett Till Players in his native Chicago to keep his memory alive. A
statue of Till and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., dedicated in Denver's
City Park in 1976, links him with the subsequent civil rights movement.
In literature, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison's
only play, Dreaming Emmett (1986), relates Till to the social changes
of the three decades following his death. And Wolf Whistle (1993), a
novel by white Southern writer Lewis Nordan, transforms the events
surrounding the murder of Emmett "Bobo" Till into a universal
experience.
Awards
Among the memorials to Till are the
celebration of Emmett Till Day in Chicago, as proclaimed by then-Mayor
Harold Washington in 1985, and the dedication of a section of the
city's 71st St., renamed Emmett Till Rd., in his honor.
Further Reading
Books
- Brady, Tom P., Black Monday, Association of Citizens' Council, 1955.
- Burnham, Louis, Behind the Lynching of Emmett Louis Till, Freedom Associates, 1955.
- Huie, William Bradford, Wolf Whistle, Signet, 1959.
- Simpson,
William M., "Reflections on a Murder: The Emmett Till Case," in
Southern Miscellany: Essays in Honor of Glover Moore, edited by Frank
Allen Dennis, University Press of Mississippi, 1981.
- Walter, Mildred Pitts, Mississippi Challenge, Bradbury Press, 1992.
- Whitaker,
Hugh Stephen, A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case
(unpublished master's thesis), Florida State University, 1963.
- Whitfield, Stephen J., A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till, The Free Press, 1988.
- Williams, Juan, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, Viking, 1987.
Periodicals- Chicago Defender, October 1, 1955.
- Chicago Tribune, August 10, 1991, p. 17.
- Commonweal, September 23, 1955, pp. 603-604.
- Ebony, March 1986, pp. 53-58.
- Jet, August 12, 1991, pp. 6-9 (a reprint of articles originally appearing in an issue from September of 1955).
- Life, October 10, 1955, p. 48.
- Look, January 24, 1956, pp. 46-49.
- Reader's Digest, April 1956, pp. 57-62.
- USA Today, September 25, 1992, p. A5.
— James J. Podesta
