Remembering Emmett Till
Remembering the Chicago teenager whose lynching helped to spark the Civil Rights Movement.
He was a 14-year old boy.
He was a jokester.
He stuttered as a result of polio.
He didn’t consent to being the poster child for racial violence in America.
All he wanted was to see if his great uncle’s stories about the Mississippi Delta was true.
He found the truth, more than anyone would have hoped or guessed.
He went to Money, Mississippi as a vibrant, happy, carefree child.
He returned to Chicago, Illinois dead - a murder victim, lynched by two white men who were punishing Emmett for being “fresh” with a White woman.
When Emmett’s mother insisted on an open casket, the whole world discovered what a 14-yeard old child looks like after being beaten, shot, and submerged in the Tallahatchie River for three days.
His death galvanized the already burgeoning Civil Rights movement. Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a bus led to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and all that followed.
The Emmett Till story featured so many familiar aspects of the American South:
A White woman who was “preyed upon” by a Black male
A Black male who was an unlikely participant in any kind of sexual harassment
White men who took the law in their own hands and summarily executed the Black male in the most horrific manner possible
An all-White jury clears the White men of all criminal charges
This would have been a sadly routine lynching, a typical act of Southern White violence against Blacks, except for two incidents that were most atypical.
The first was Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie.
Because she insisted on an open-casket funeral and allowed photographers to take pictures of his bloated, mutilated corpse, Emmett’s murder gained international attention.
Maybe it was her being outraged at what had happened with her baby boy.
Maybe she felt that since she didn’t live in the South she could do what most Black people in the South - fight back.
Whatever the reasons, she fought back in the only way she could - in the court of public opinion. The photographs of Emmett’s body put the spotlight on American racism and put the lie to the fanciful myth of the genteel Southern way of life.
The second factor that made this lynching different is the brazen after-trial confessions of Emmett’s murderers. The White woman’s husband and his half-brother gleefully confessed their crime to Look Magazine after their acquittal, knowing that the legal clause known as Double Jeopardy prevented them from being prosecuted twice for the same crime.
Two quotes from the half-brother, J.W. Milam stand out. First,
“What else could I do? He thought he was as good as any White man.
And more pointedly:
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. G—— you, I'm going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.'
Killing Black people in the South is one thing.
Laughing and whispering about it behind closed doors with sympathizers is expected.
But admitting to lynching a 14-year old boy in a national magazine was entirely different.
After their admission of guilt, Mississippi Blacks and whites shunned them. Blacks for obvious reasons, and Whites for the audacity of removing the imaginary veil off the segregated South. Both Milam and his half brother moved to Texas to start over, had run ins with the law, and both died of cancer in their sixties.
Emmett Till didn’t live to see the age of 15.
He didn’t live to celebrate his 80th birthday, which would have been on July 25.
He might have been a patriarch who passed his many years of living on to future generations.
Who knows what kind of doer or strategist he could have been?
What his children and grandchildren might have accomplished.
Whatever hopes, dreams, and ambitions a 14-year old Black youngster from Chicago might have had in 1955 ended in terror and brutality on a hot night in Mississippi.
So many Black lives have been lost under similar circumstances.
And this is the history that many are trying to erase.
But we will not forget.
We will write about it.
We will talk about it.
We will cry and scream about it.
But we won’t forget.
Nor will we let the world forget.