"TILL"

 “TILL”

The death of Carolyn Bryant Donham last week revived memories of a horrible lynching in Mississippi in the summer of 1955 – a teenage boy named Emmett Till was jerked from his uncle’s home and tortured and murdered because of false allegations that Carolyn Bryant had made against the Black teenager from Chicago, who was visiting his family down South for the summer.  Bryant’s husband and brother-in-law kidnapped young Till in the middle of the night, tortured him and then killed him, dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River.  This story was depicted well in the movie “Till,” which came out late last year.  The movie centered on Mamie Till Mobley, whose deep grief and then searing anger at the murder of her son, turned what was an “ordinary” and horrible event in the South, into a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

I grew up in this era, on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River Delta.  I lived 75 miles from Money, Mississippi, where these gruesome events happened, but I had no idea about them.  95% of those of us in the white South at this time were so captured by the racism and white supremacy of our culture that these kinds of events would seem “ordinary,” a terrible but true thing to say.  I checked with my good and long-time friend David Billings, who grew up with me in Arkansas, and he indicated that he also had no knowledge of these events at the time.  The depressing and disturbing part of our journey as young, white Southerners, is that even if we had knowledge of the lynching of Emmett Till, it would have not made any difference.  We might have winced a bit at Till’s young age, but we would have agreed that the order of white supremacy must be kept intact.

Because of Mamie Till Mobley’s courage and tenacity, however, the murder of her son became one of the sparks that ignited the civil rights movement.  She would not allow this lynching to be seen as “ordinary,” as part of the price that Black people must pay in the South.  She wanted to name this murder for what it was, and she wanted the world to know that it was barbaric.  She came down to Mississippi to get her son’s body, and she made the courageous but difficult decision to have the casket open at his funeral in Chicago.  She defied everyone to do this, because she wanted all to see how brutally her son had been tortured before he was killed.  

    Her decision became a powerful symbol for Black people of that and later generations.  Emmett Till’s body lay in state for 3 days, and over 50,000 people came to see it.  David Jackson, a photographer for Jet Magazine, got permission to publish photos of Emmett Till’s tortured body.   Those photos in Jet galvanized Black people all over the country, and Emmett Till became a symbol of the kind of life that Black people would no longer tolerate.  Later that year, Rosa Parks would say his name to herself, as she sat and waited for the police to come and arrest her in Montgomery.  In 1962 in the Albany Campaign led by Martin Luther King, Jr and SCLC, Reverend Samuel Wells called out to the crowd in a speech there:

 “My name is being called on the road to freedom.  I can hear the blood of Emmett Till as it calls from the ground….When shall we go? Not tomorrow! Not at high noon! Now!” They became known as the “Emmett Till generation.”

    The lynching of Emmett Till became one of four key events that re-ignited the civil rights movement in the 1950’s, joining the Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board which unanimously ruled in 1954 that legal segregation was unconstitutional; the Montgomery bus boycott started by Rosa Parks in Montgomery in 1955; and the Little Rock school crisis in 1957, in which President Eisenhower reluctantly sent federal troops to Little Rock to enable 9 Black kids to go to public school at Central High School there.  The famous series “Eyes on the Prize” led off with the lynching of Emmett Till.

    In 1956, Look Magazine (remember that one?) paid a hefty sum of $10,000 to William Bradford Huie to write a story about the Till case, including interviews with Roy Bryant and JT Milam, who had kidnapped, tortured and murdered Emmett Till. They admitted that they had killed Till, and they did so because they had already been tried and acquitted for the murder.  In a 2017 interview with Timothy Tyson, Carolyn Bryant admitted that she had not told the truth about her encounter with Emmett Till in that store in August, 1955, that indeed she had made most of it up.  The Leflore County district attorney had tried to indict her after that admission, but the grand jury refused to return an indictment.  The FBI also reopened the case that year but later closed it, with no action.  

    Not much changes in relation to race – Black folk and other people of color know how the system is structured.  Those of us classified as “white” refuse to acknowledge that the system works like this – indeed, Trump and others are building a case based on white grievance, the same base that executed Emmett Till.  May we hear his name in the way that Reverend Samuel Wells did in 1962 – it’s time now to act for justice and equity.