The murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till August 28, 1955,
in Money, Mississippi, the photographic evidence presented in national news
outlets of the brutality administered, and the acquittal of Till’s murderers
September 23 are credited by many historians as the major impetus for the advent
of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Martin Luther King Jr. would write that Till’s murder “was one of the most
brutal and inhuman crimes of the 20th century.”
One hundred days after Till's
murder, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama
city bus, sparking the yearlong Montgomery
Bus Boycott. … "I thought about Emmett Till, and I couldn't
go back [to the back of the bus], Parks wrote (Emmett 4).
Emmett Louis Till was born on July 25,
1941, in Chicago, the only child of Louis and Mamie Till. Till never knew his
father, a private in the United
States Army during World War II.
Mamie and Louis Till separated in 1942, and
three years later, the family received word from the Army that the soldier had
been executed for "willful misconduct" while serving in Italy (Emmett 2), the misconduct being the rape of two women and the murder of
another.
Defying the social constraints and
discrimination she faced as an African-American woman growing up in the 1920s
and '30s, Mamie Till excelled both academically and professionally.
She was only the fourth black student to
graduate from suburban Chicago's predominantly white Argo Community High
School, and the first black student to make the school's "A" Honor
Roll. While raising Emmett Till as a single mother, she worked long hours for
the Air Force as a clerk in charge of confidential files.
Emmett Till, who went by the nickname Bobo,
grew up in a thriving, middle-class black neighborhood on Chicago's South Side. The neighborhood was a
haven for black-owned businesses, and the streets he roamed as a child were
lined with black-owned insurance companies, pharmacies and beauty salons as
well as nightclubs that drew the likes of Duke Ellington and Sarah Vaughan.
Those who knew Till best described him as a
responsible, funny and infectiously high-spirited child. He was stricken with
polio at the age of 5, but managed to make a full recovery, save a slight
stutter that remained with him for the rest of his life.
With his mother often working more than
12-hour days, Till took on his full share of domestic responsibilities from a
very young age. "Emmett had all the house responsibility," his mother
later recalled. "I mean everything was really on his shoulders, and Emmett
took it upon himself. He told me if I would work, and make the money, he would
take care of everything else. He cleaned, and he cooked quite a bit. And he
even took over the laundry."
Till attended the all-black McCosh Grammar
School. His classmate and childhood pal, Richard
Heard, later recalled, "Emmett was a funny guy all the time. He had a
suitcase of jokes that he liked to tell. He loved to make people laugh. He was
a chubby kid; most of the guys were skinny, but he didn't let that stand in his
way. He made a lot of friends at McCosh."
In August 1955, Till's great uncle, Moses
Wright, came up from Mississippi to visit the
family in Chicago.
At the end of his stay, Wright was planning to take Till's cousin, Wheeler
Parker, back to Mississippi with him to visit relatives down South, and when
Till, who was just 14 years old at the time, learned of these plans, he begged
his mother to let him go along.
Initially, Till's mother was opposed to the
idea. She wanted to take a road trip to Omaha,
Nebraska, and tried to convince
her son to join her with the promise of open-road driving lessons.
But Till desperately wanted to spend time
with his cousins in Mississippi, and in a fateful decision that would have
grave impact on their lives and the course of American history, Till's mother
relented and let him go.
On August 19, 1955—the day before Till left
with his uncle and cousin for Mississippi—Mamie
Till gave her son his late father's signet ring, engraved with the initials
"L.T."
The next day she drove her son to the 63rd Street station
in Chicago.
They kissed goodbye, and Till boarded a southbound train headed for Mississippi. It was the
last time they ever saw each other (Emmett 3-4).
The plan had been to stay in “the small northern Mississippi
town of Money”
for two weeks. “Emmett sampled the Mississippi life of his
cousins during the first three days of his visit: picking cotton, shooting off
fireworks, stealing watermelons, and swimming in a snake-infested pond” (Linder
2) .
In an article for Look Magazine,
which appeared in January 1956, investigative reporter William Bradford Huie
wrote: About 7:30 pm, eight young Negroes
-- seven boys and a girl -- in a '46 Ford had stopped outside [Bryant’s
Grocery and Meat Market]. They included
sons, grandsons and a nephew of Moses (Preacher) Wright, 64, a 'cropper. They
were between 13 and 19 years old. Four were natives of the Delta and others,
including the nephew, Emmett (Bobo) Till, were visiting from the Chicago area.
Bobo Till was 14 years old: born on July
25, 1941. He was stocky, muscular, weighing about 160, five feet four or five.
Preacher later testified: "He looked like a man."
Bobo's party joined a dozen other young
Negroes, including two other girls, in front of the store. Bryant had built
checkerboards there. Some were playing checkers, others were wrestling and
"kiddin' about girls."
Bobo bragged about his white girl. He
showed the boys a picture of a white girl in his wallet; and to their jeers of
disbelief, he boasted of success with her.
"You talkin' mighty big, Bo," one
youth said. "There's a pretty little white woman in the store. Since you
know how to handle white girls, let's see you go in and get a date with
her?"
"You ain't chicken, are yuh, Bo?"
another youth taunted him (Huie 5).
Huie explains: Carolyn Holloway
Bryant is 21, five feet tall, weighs 103 pounds. An Irish girl, with black hair
and black eyes, she is a small farmer's daughter who, at 17, quit high school
at Indianola, Miss., to marry a soldier, Roy Bryant, then 20. The couple have
two boys, three and two; and they operate a store at a dusty crossroads called
Money: post office, filling station and three stores clustered around a school
and a gin, and set in the vast, lonely cotton patch that is the Mississippi
Delta.
Carolyn and Roy Bryant are poor: no car, no
TV. They live in the back of the store which Roy's brothers helped set up when
he got out of the 82nd Airborne in 1953. They sell
"snuff-and-fatback" to Negro field hands on credit: and they earn
little because, for one reason, the government has been giving the Negroes food
they formerly bought.
Carolyn and Roy Bryant's social life is
visits to their families, to the Baptist church, and, whenever they can borrow
a car, to a drive-in, with the kids sleeping in the back seat. They call Shane
the best picture they ever saw.
For extra money, Carolyn tends store when Roy works outside -- like
truck driving for a brother. And he has many brothers. His mother had two
husbands, 11 children.
On Wednesday evening, August 24, 1955, Roy was in Texas,
on a brother's truck. He had carted shrimp from New Orleans
to San Antonio, proceeded to Brownsville. Carolyn was alone in the store.
But back in the living quarters was her sister-in-law Juanita Milam, 27, with
her two small sons and Carolyn's two. The store was kept open till 9 on week
nights, 11 on Saturday.
When her husband was away, Carolyn Bryant
never slept in the store, never stayed there alone after dark. Moreover, in the
Delta, no white woman ever travels country roads after dark unattended by a
man.
This meant that during Roy's absences -- particularly since he had
no car -- there was family inconvenience. Each afternoon, a sister-in-law
arrived to stay with Carolyn until closing time. Then, the two women, with
their children, waited for a brother-in-law to convoy them to his home. Next
morning, the sister-in-law drove Carolyn back.
Juanita Milam had driven from her home in Glendora. She had parked
in front of the store to the left; and under the front seat of this car was Roy
Bryant's pistol, a .38 Colt automatic. Carolyn knew it was there. After 9,
Juanita's husband, J. W. Milam, would arrive in his pickup to shepherd them to
his home for the night (Huie 4-5).
Challenged by his peers, Till entered the Bryant store. Accounts of what happened inside varied,
considerably. Carolyn Bryant’s testimony
during the trial of her husband and brother-in-law was condemnatory.
Bryant said that "just after
dark" with her alone in the store, Till strongly gripped her hand as she held it out on the candy counter to collect
money. She said she jerked her hand
loose "with much difficulty" as Till asked her, "How about a
date, baby?" When she tried to walk
away, she stated, Till grabbed her by the waist and said, "You needn't be
afraid of me. I've"--and here
Bryant said Till used an "unprintable word"--"white women
before." Bryant testified, "I
was just scared to death." After
listening to Bryant's testimony, Judge Curtis Swango ruled it inadmissible
though, as courtroom observers noted, every juror undoubtedly had heard
Bryant's story already anyway ((Linder 8).
Years
later, Simeon Wright, Emmett’s cousin, offered this account.
As we reached Bryant’s store, we continued our usual
small talk and banter. We were still
excited about the day’s events and happy to be in town together. We all got out of the car and were milling
around in the front of the store when Wheeler [Emmett’s cousin] went in to buy a pop or some candy. Bobo went in after him; then Wheeler came
out, leaving Bobo in there alone.
Maurice immediately sent me into the store to be with
Bobo. He was concerned about Bobo being
in the store alone because of what had happened on the previous Sunday, when
Bobo had set his fireworks off inside the city limits. He just didn’t know the Mississippi rules, and Maurice felt that
someone should be with Bobo at all times.
For less than a minute he was in the store alone with
Carolyn Bryant, the white woman working at the cash register. What he said, if anything, before I came in I
don’t know. While I was in the store,
Bobo did nothing inappropriate. He
didn’t grab Mrs. Bryant, nor did he put his arms around her – that was the
story she later told to the court. A
counter separated the customers from the store clerk; Bobo would have had to
jump over it to get to Mrs. Bryant. Bobo
didn’t ask her for a date or call her “baby.”
There was no lecherous conversation between them. And after a few minutes he paid for his items
and we left the store together. We had
been outside the store only a few seconds when Mrs. Bryant came out behind us,
heading straight to her car. As she walked,
Bobo whistled at her. I think he wanted
to get a laugh out of us or something.
He was always joking around, and it was hard to tell when he was
serious. It was a loud wolf whistle, a
big-city “whee wheeeee!” and it caught us all by surprise. We all looked at each other, realizing that
Bobo had violated a longstanding unwritten law, a social taboo about conduct
between blacks and white in the South.
Suddenly we felt we were in danger, and we stared at each other, all
with the same expression of fear and panic.
Like a group of boys who had thrown a rock through somebody’s window, we
ran to the car. Bobo, with a slight limp
from the polio he’d contracted as a child, ran along with us, but not as
panic-stricken as we were. After seeing
our fright, it did slowly dawn on him that he had done something wrong (Wright 1).
Newspaperman
Devery Anderson offered a slightly different interpretation. Till
entered the store and purchased bubble gum; when he left, Carolyn followed him
to the door. A Northerner unfamiliar with Southern etiquette, he then waved,
said "goodbye" (not "goodbye, ma'am"), and, according to
family members, directed a wolf-whistle at the young white woman. She became
upset and went toward a car -- to get a gun, according to trial testimony. Till
and his frightened companions got in their own car and sped off toward home (Anderson 1)
Thus had
been set the pretext for a horrible crime.
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