﻿Hi, I’m Clint Smith and this is Crash Course Black American History.
The 1955 murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy visiting his family in Money, Mississippi,
was one of the most important catalysts of the Civil Rights Movement.
A heads up that this episode is going to include some violent descriptions
and images, but we think it’s important to do so, so that you can more fully understand
what prompted so many Black Americans to mobilize and risk their lives in the pursuit
of civil rights. These descriptions of violence also demonstrate how the threat of being subjected
to domestic white supremacist terror, hung over Black people in the South like a cloud that just
wouldn’t go away. Let’s learn more about what happened to Emmett Till, and start the show.
INTRO In August of 1955, Emmett,
who lived in Chicago, was visiting his uncle and cousins in Money, Mississippi.
Emmett and a group of teenagers went shopping at a local store called Bryant’s Grocery and
Meat Market. This store, owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant, sold items to mostly
Black sharecroppers and their families. Some kids, who were outside of the store,
later stated that they heard Emmett whistle at Carolyn.
Later, Carolyn Bryant accused Emmett of making a sexual remark toward her and of grabbing her.
And as we’ll get to soon… this was a lie. A few days later, in the middle of the night
on August 28th, Roy Bryant - Carolyn’s husband - and his half brother J. W. Milam kidnapped Emmett
from the home of his uncle, Mose Wright. Emmett’s cousins witnessed the kidnapping.
Emmett Till was then brutally beaten by Roy Bryant and several other members of
the white community. He was taken to the edge of the Tallahatchie River, shot in the head,
tied to a 75 pound metal fan that weighed his body down, and then dropped to the bottom of the water.
Three days later, his body was pulled from the water. He was so badly beaten and decomposed,
that his family could only identify him by the ring on his finger.
Following the murder, Emmett Till’s body was shipped back to his family in Chicago. His mother,
Mamie Till, while emotionally distraught, made a decision that would reverberate throughout
history, she decided that her son should have an open casket funeral. As she put it:
“Let the people see what they did to my boy.” Emmett's body was on display for five days
at Roberts Temple Church of God. Tens of thousands of people came to pay
their respects and to see in person the evidence of the violence inflicted on this child.
But what made the name Emmett Till iconic was a powerful and devastating photograph that was taken
by David Jackson, which captured Mamie Till gazing down at her son’s ravaged and deformed body.
The image is haunting, and what these men had done to Emmett’s face, was horrifying. The photo,
along with others, were published in Jet magazine and the images of Till’s deformed face alongside
images of him before his death, smiling and looking like the child that he was, forced
people to confront the terror that Black people in the South had been subjected to for a century.
Mamie Till would say, “I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me.
And if the death of my son can mean something to the other unfortunate people all over the world,
then for him to have died a hero would mean more to me than for him just to have died.”
This seems like an important moment to acknowledge why Black-led media outlets,
like Jet Magazine and the Chicago Defender, both of which were based out of Chicago,
are so important to telling and understanding the story of Black life in this country.
These outlets told the sorts of stories that other outlets weren’t always willing to,
and during the Civil Rights Movement they would play an enormous role
in sharing the news about marches and covering the violence the protestors experienced.
Today, the original Jet Magazine, with the published photos of Emmett Till,
can now be found at the Smithsonian‘s National Museum of African-American History and Culture.
But back to the murder itself. So in early September, the Governor of
Mississippi - Hugh White - ordered officials to prosecute Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in the case.
Now let’s pause here. In previous episodes, we’ve learned about important legal victories for Black
Americans at the Federal level. But the state and local courts were often a different story.
To put it mildly, this court case was a sham. But, unfortunately, it was not atypical.
Rarely were lynchings and brutal murders like this actually prosecuted with real justice. And people
knew that. White people knew that throughout the South they could kill a Black person and get away
with it, which is how so many thousands of Black people came to be lynched in the century following
the Civil War. And this terror was intentional. As Sherylin Ifill writes in her book On the
Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century, “more than
the poll tax, the grandfather clause, and Jim Crow segregation, lynching and the threat of lynching
helped regulate and restrict all aspects of black advancement, independence, and citizenship.”
On September 19, 1955, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant were tried in Sumner, Mississippi.
An all white jury was selected, and no Black jurors were even considered. In the trial,
plenty of testimony and evidence showed that Milam and Bryant did kill Emmett Till.
Even Emmett’s uncle testified that he saw him kidnapped and pointed out who did it.
But it didn’t matter. And Emmett’s uncle was even run out of town for telling the truth.
The jury deliberated, and after one hour and seven minutes, they ruled that
Milam and Bryant weren’t guilty. The Black community in Mississippi, and across the country,
was devastated by this outcome. But, they weren’t surprised.
And if the not guilty verdict wasn’t enough on its own, in January 1956, Bryant and Milam
admitted to committing the murder. Like, they just said it. Directly.
With no equivocation. They did this, because they were protected by double jeopardy - the idea that
one cannot be tried for the same crime twice - and since they were already found not guilty
in a previous trial, they could not be prosecuted by the legal system.
All of this happened after Brown v. Board of Education, which has led many scholars
to say that this event was an example of the hostility that many white people in the South
had towards that ruling and towards the emerging civil rights movement.
After the trial, many other publications around the world
picked up the story as well. These articles explicitly addressed the hypocrisy of American
ideas of justice, independence, and freedom. Part of what I think about, when I think about the
murder of Emmett Till, is how recent this history is. A few years ago, I was walking through the
National Museum of African American History and Culture with my grandparents. And in the museum,
is an exhibit that holds the casket that Emmett Till was originally buried in.
I was pushing my grandfather, a man born in 1930 Jim Crow Mississippi, in a wheelchair as we
entered the room. We approached Emmett’s casket, its bronze hue radiating under the museum lights.
It sat open, exposing us to a photograph of what Emmett’s mother, who, remember, insisted
on an open-casket funeral, had chosen to show: what white supremacy had done to her son.
I had seen images of it before, and did not need to listen to anything
other than the soft buzzing light above us to know of Mamie Till’s unceasing sobs.
My grandfather looked at the casket, his eyes moving unhurriedly across its frame.
“He was killed in the next town over from where your grandmother and I lived.
Only a few miles away.” As you know,
I think about the history of racism in this country all the time. I think about how quickly
we are to espouse notions of progress without accounting for its uncertain and serpentine path.
I think of how decades of racial violence shape everything we see, but sometimes I
can forget its impact on those right next to me. I sometimes forget that, but for the arbitrary
nature of circumstance, what happened to Emmett Till could have happened to my grandfather.
Emmett Till was born in 1941, if he were alive today, as of the recording of this video,
he would be 80 years old. This is important, to understand that he could have very easily
still been alive today. Going to the grocery store, picking up his mail from the post office,
waving hello to his neighbors, or going to his grandchildren’s soccer games.
The possibilities of growing old, were stolen from him, as they have been stolen
from the thousands of Black people lynched across the 20th century.
Sometimes we tell ourselves that the most nefarious displays of racial violence happened
a long time ago, when they were, in fact, not so long ago at all. These images and videos that
appall our twenty-first-century sensibilities are filled with people who are still among us today.
I think often of Ruth Bonner, the woman who rang the bell to signal the opening of the National
Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016, and how she was the daughter of a man
born into slavery. Not the granddaughter. Not the great granddaughter. She was the
daughter of someone born into slavery. None of this was that long ago.
Thanks for watching. I’ll see you next time. Crash Course is made with the help of
all these nice people and our animation team is Thought Cafe.
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