Title: The Blood of Emmett Till
Rating: 4 Stars
I’d guess that most people know the story of Emmett Till. 14 years old, living in Chicago, his mother, Mamie, sent him down to visit relatives in Mississippi. From Mississippi herself, she explicitly told him the Mississippi rules that a black person must abide by.
In Mississippi, at a small local store, Till may or may not have made an inappropriate comment to the proprietor, Carolyn Bryant. Bryant went out to get her gun. Till may or may not have whistled at her then. Till and his relatives quickly ran off when they saw her gun.
Several nights later, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam pulled up to the house where Till was staying. Till was taken out to a truck. Days later, his body, horribly bruised, battered, and mutilated, was found in the Tallahatchie River.
Till’s body was sent back to Chicago. Mamie Till insisted on an open casket viewing. Tens of thousands of people passed through to see the body. Nationwide news coverage ensued. After the funeral, civil rights became Mamie Till’s mission in life.
Back in Mississippi, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were arrested and brought to trial. Everyone expected them to get off. No one really expected the prosecution or the judge to try too hard to bring justice. In fact, the judge, by all accounts, proved to be fair. The prosecutor put on a case and offered a powerful summation. Black witnesses, never expected to ever testify against a white man, were called and, during their testimony, they bravely identified the defendants by standing up and pointing to them. One of them, an eighteen year old, was immediately whisked out of Mississippi due to the very real threat on his life.
To no one’s surprise, after an hour of deliberation, the all white male jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Afterwards, they claimed that they could have returned much faster but they wanted to drink the Coca Cola’s that they ordered and they wanted to make it look like they at least tried to deliberate.
Those are the basic facts. What new did I learn from this reading?
Twelve years later, someone interviewed the members of the jury. To a man, they all admitted that they knew that the defendants were guilty but had acquitted them because they believed that Emmett Till had it coming to him. In Mississippi, a black man committing the crime of ‘smart talking’ to a white woman deserves death.
This is interesting because the jury didn’t even hear Carolyn Bryant’s testimony. In fact, there was no reason for the jury to hear it. After all, the crime on trial was murder. There is no legal mitigating factor that would require her testimony. The judge disallowed it, but the defense team insisted on putting Bryant on the stand, out of the jury’s hearing, just to send out the message that Till had it coming to him.
Years later, Bryant admitted that she lied on the stand. On the stand, she said that Till placed his arm around her waist. She said that he used sexual obscenities (that she was so embarrassed to repeat that she wouldn’t even say the first letter of the obscenity during her testimony). In her later years, she admitted none of that was true.
Although no witnesses saw the murder, several did see Till while he was kidnapped by the two men. They saw possibly up to three black men holding Till captive. They were suspected to be in Milam’s employ. What a statement this makes regarding the power structure in Mississippi. Black men forced to watch, if not tacitly participate, while a black child is tortured to death for talking to a white woman sends a powerful message regarding the unchallenged power that whites held in Mississippi.
Thanks to the efforts of Mamie Till, bringing the bright spotlight of publicity to her son’s death had wide repercussions for the future civil rights movement. Later in 1955, when she was asked to move to the back of the bus, Rosa Parks said that she was thinking of Emmett Till when she refused. Only a year older than Till, the great civil rights leader and long time Congressman, John Lewis, was directly inspired to action from the murder and trial.
I’ve written about this before, but the US started taking action on civil rights not because it was the right thing to do but because the negative publicity from such events as the murder and trial was having an impact upon the Cold War. The Soviet Union was able to use this atrocity in its propaganda to get an upper hand when dealing with Asian and African nations. The message was that, if the US treated its own citizen people of color like this, then why would they care about you? Having to answer this propaganda was a driving force to encourage the adoption of civil rights at a national level.
In the civil rights history, there is a lot of discussion about LBJ’s fighting for civil rights legislation even while knowing it would probably doom his party in the South. There is a lot of talk about the Supreme Court decisions that forced the South to change.
What you don’t hear much about are the black heroes. You do hear about martyrs like Martin Luther King or Medgar Evers. There were many black people in Mississippi that put their lives and their livelihoods on the line. Some of them were former WWII veterans who were sent overseas to fight for the Four Freedoms but then returned home to a land lacking in those freedoms. Having fought and won a war, they were not going to passively accept their lot. Amzie Moore and Dr T.R.M Howard were two such figures featured heavily in this work. Acknowledging such black leaders in the civil rights movement is critical to understanding how the fight for equality was led by black people.
In 1955, Bryant’s and Milam’s actions were considered normal. They expected no repercussions from their acts of murder. It was the spotlight of publicity that brought Till’s torture and murder into view and made it heinous.
Similarly, when Derek Chauvin placed his knee on George Floyd’s neck for 8:46 while Floyd begged for his life and pleaded for his mother (witnesses heard Till also plead for his mother), Chauvin expected no ramifications. The look on his face while eyewitnesses filmed and yelled, if anything, seems bored.
The title of this post is inaccurate. It didn’t start with Emmett Till and it doesn’t end with George Floyd. If there is a connective tissue between the two, besides a horrific murder, it is that systemic behavior is changed only by constantly shining the spotlight of publicity upon it.
The system must change.
dorkenstein 