In August of 1963, the historic March on Washington took place. It was there
that Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the most memorable and
frequently quoted speech of the Civil Rights Era. He had a dream.
In December of 1955, Rosa Parks refused to
give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, spurring many copycat bus
boycotts all over the United States as forms of public civil
disobedience. She was tired of giving in.
However, before either of these recognizable
and great moments in history took place it was August of 1955, and a
young boy from Chicago named Emmett Till went to
visit his uncle in Western Mississippi. Money, a sleepy town of
four hundred in Tallahatchie County, was situated on the Tallahatchie River and most of its population
lived off the extensive cotton plantations common to the Mississippi
Delta.
At this time, the Northern and Southern United States had very different
atmospheres in regards to race relations. Not to dismiss the presence
of racism in the North, but the sentiments of the South were of
different caliber. This Southern racism was accepted, it was overt, and
it was unapologetic.
On August 24,
1955,
Emmett Till, his cousin, and some of their friends visited Roy
Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, presumably to buy some candy
from the shop. At this point, the historical accuracy of the following
events is not definitive. Some say that Emmett whistled a cat-call at
Mrs. Carolyn Bryant, a white woman and the wife of the shop-owner who
was attending the shop counter. Others say that Emmett brushed her hand
when he was paying for his sweets. Some even say that neither of these
scenarios ever took place, describing Emmett as a painfully shy 14-year
old boy with a stutter and without such audacity.
In whatever case, the subsequent chain of
events is accurate.
It was the middle of the night on August 27, 1955. Roy Bryant and his
half-brother J.W. Milam decided they would be the ones to “teach
that boy a lesson.” By this time, the whole of the county had
heard about the “incident” at the Grocery, and Bryant was eager
to avenge the supposed mistreatment of his wife. Suffice it to say that
the fact that Emmett Till was a young African-American boy far away
from home was not of any help to him.
Bryant and Milam arrived at the home of Mose Wright, Emmett’s great-uncle with whom
he was staying while visiting Mississippi. They dragged the boy from
the house at gunpoint. They proceeded to take him to an abandoned shed
and beat him until he was unrecognizable. They cut off his ear. They
shot him with a pistol. And finally, they tied a metal cotton gin fan
to his lifeless body and drowned him in the nearby Tallahatchie River.
Emmett Till’s face was beaten so badly
that his face could not be recognized. His body was stretched and
swollen with water after being left in the river. Bryant and Milam
attempted to convince the police that this disfigured body was not
Emmett Till. However, a ring left on his finger finally identified him.
Both Bryant and Milam would go on to be acquitted by an all-white,
twelve-man jury.
Though this is an undoubtedly tragic example
of violence and racial tensions in the Jim Crow-era South, it was what
happened in the wake of this brutality that set a spark to the powder
keg of the civil rights movement.
Met with initial dispute, Mamie
Till demanded that her son’s body be sent back to Chicago for his funeral. She
demanded this until it was done, and when it was done she performed one
of the bravest and most selfless acts I have ever encountered. Mamie Till, in the midst of the most severe grief a
mother can experience, opened her son’s casket for the world to
see. She opened Emmett Till’s casket and she invited the press.
The newspaper reporters came with their steno
pads and pens. They brought their cameras and their flashes. They
brought their eyes and their ears, and they brought their memories so
that a nation ravaged by racism may never forget what had happened
there.
It was this event that put a human face on
the Jim Crow laws in the United States. Jim Crow was not two
different water fountains. Jim Crow was not two different lunch
counters. Jim Crow was Emmett Till. Jim Crow was Emmett Till’s
past, his story and it was most importantly, his legacy.
This event is arguably what began the fight
for Civil Rights in America, occurring before any of
the more talked about events of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet these names,
Emmett and Mamie Till, are not an integral
part of the Civil Rights lexicon. It is time to change that. You have
read these words, and you have all seen these pictures. Thomas King, a
Cherokee author, would say that you cannot say you’ve never heard
this story, because now you have. You, as an individual, must decide
what you will do with it.
Even though his name is not the most
familiar, Emmett Till’s legacy is not lost. He is still alive in
many places, if you do him the justice of looking. He’s there in
a Bob Dylan song. He’s there in Toni Morrison’s poetry.
He’s even in a reference in a recent Kanye
West song. You will find Emmett’s presence especially in the city
of Chicago. He has his name on 71st street on the south side, and just
this month the elementary school he attended was renamed in his honor.
We must always look at these pictures, even
though they are difficult to view. They were not easy to look at in
1955 when these same black-and-white images scared the United States and they are not easy to
look at today. However, these images, strengthened perhaps by their
unrestrained and coarse carnage, forced the people of the United States to see what had been
happening, unchecked, in many of their own backyards. We must always
look because we must always remember our history and we must always
remember our heroes.
Mamie Till-Mobley opened these
windows for all of us. May we always be looking out of them. Lest we forget.
Last month marked the four-year anniversary
of Mamie Till-Mobley’s death from heart
failure in Chicago. She was 81 years old.
