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Born: July 25, 1941
Chicago, Illinois, USA
Died: August 28, 1955
Tallhatchie River near Glendora, Mississippi, USA |
Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till
From
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till (July 25, 1941 - August 28,
1955) was an African-American teenager from Chicago, Illinois
who was brutally lynched in a region of Mississippi known as the
Mississippi Delta near the small town of Drew in Sunflower County.
His murder was one of the key events which energized the nascent
American Civil Rights Movement. Although the main suspects for
the crime were acquitted, a federal investigation into his murder
was initiated in 2004.
Events
Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Carthan Till (Bradley, Mobley)
and Louis Till. His mother was born to John and Alma Carthan in
the small Delta town of Money. When she was two years old, her
family moved to Illinois. Emmett's mother largely raised him on
her own; she and Louis had separated in 1942. Emmett Till's father
was drafted into the United States Army in 1943 during World War
II, and was executed by the U.S. Army for raping two Italian women
and murdering a third.
In 1955, when Till was 14 years old, he was sent for a summer
stay with his great uncle, Moses Wright, who lived in Money, Mississippi
(a small town eight miles north of Greenwood).
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| Emmett Till and his mother |
Prior to his journey into the Delta, Emmett's mother cautioned
him to "mind his manners" with white
people. She told her boy not to fool with white people in Mississippi,
"If you have to get on your knees and bow when a
white person goes past, do it willingly."
Till's mother understood that in Mississippi race relations were
a lot different than in Chicago. In Mississippi, over 500 blacks
had been lynched since 1882, and racially motivated murders were
still not unfamiliar, especially in the Delta where Till was going
to visit. Racial tensions were also on the rise after the United
States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education
to end segregation in schools.
Till arrived on August 21; on August 24, he joined other teenagers
as they went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to get some refreshments.
The teens were children of sharecroppers and had been picking
cotton all day. The market was owned by Roy and Carolyn Bryant,
and mostly catered to the local sharecropper population. While
in the store, Till allegedly whistled at, or openly flirted with,
Carolyn Bryant and this action greatly angered her husband when
he returned home several days later from an out-of-town trip.
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| Carolyn Bryant |
There was no doubt that something had happened between Till
and Carolyn Bryant when he and his cousin went
inside the small Money grocery store owned by the Bryants. Carolyn
Bryant later asserted that Till had grabbed her at the waist and
asked her for a date. She said the young man also used
"unprintable" words. He had a slight stutter and some
have conjectured that Bryant might have misinterpreted what Till
said. Others say that he could have been mildly retarded and any
unexpected behavior on his part might easily have been misconstrued.
Several black youths, all under 16, were reported to have been
with Till in the store and according to one newspaper account,
forced him to leave the store for being "rowdy."
By the time twenty-nine-year-old Roy Bryant returned to Money
from a road trip three days after his wife's encounter with Till,
it seemed that everyone in Tallahatchie County knew about the
incident, every conceivable version, and Bryant decided that he
and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, 40, would meet around 2:00
a.m. on Sunday to "teach the boy a lesson.
Lynching
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| Tallhatchie River near Glendora where Emmett Till's
body was thrown from the bridge. |
At about 2:30 AM on August 28, Roy Bryant and his half brother,
J.W. Milam, kidnapped Till, once physically afflicted by polio,
from his uncle's house in the small cotton town of Money, Mississippi.
He was driven away to a weathered plantation shed in neighboring
Sunflower County, where they brutally beat him, gouged out an
eye, then shot him with a .45 caliber pistol before tying a seventy-five
pound cotton gin fan around Till's neck with barbed wire. This
was to weigh down his body, which was dropped into the Tallahatchie
River near Glendora, another small cotton town. A witness heard
Till's screams for hours until the two men finally ended Emmett
Till's life.
Though others were clearly involved, the brothers were soon
under suspicion for the boy's disappearance and were arrested
August 29 after spending the night with relatives living in Rulville,
only several miles away from where the murder actually took place.
Both men first admitted they had taken the boy from his great-uncle's
home but claimed they turned him loose the same night. Word got
out that Till was missing and soon NAACP civil rights leaders
Medgar Evers, the state field secretary; and Amzie Moore, head
of the Bolivar County chapter, became involved, disguising themselves
as cotton pickers and going into the cotton fields in search of
any information that would help find the young Delta visitor.
After collecting laborers' stories first hand, Amzie Moore, a
Delta civil rights veteran years since before World War II, observed
it was apparent that "more than 2,000 families"
were murdered and lynched over the years, with their bodies thrown
into the Delta's swamps and bayous (a much larger figure than
the officially estimated "500" bodies).
Some believed that relatives of Till were hiding him out of fear
for the youth's safety. Or that he had been sent back to Chicago
where he would be safe. Regardless, witnesses told the Sheriff
that Mrs. Bryant identified Till as "the one" after which the
group drove away with Till.
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| Emmett Till's Body after being pulled from the river. |
Bryant and Milam claimed they later found out Till was not "the
one" who allegedly insulted Mrs. Bryant, and swore to Sheriff
George Smith they had released the young Chicago visitor. They
would later recant and confess, after the trial ended.
In an editorial on Friday, September 2, Greenville journalist
Hodding Carter, Jr. asserted that "people who are guilty
of this savage crime should be prosecuted to the fullest extent
of the law," a brave suggestion for any Mississippi newspaper
editor to make and remain out of harm's way, Carter included.
After a Tutwiler mortuary assistant worked all night to prepare
the body as best he could, Mamie Till brought Till's body back
to Chicago.
The Chicago funeral home offered to clean up the body for viewing,
but Mamie declined, choosing to leave his coffin open. She wanted
people to see how badly Till's body had been disfigured. News
photographs of Till's mutilated corpse circulated around the country,
notably appearing in Jet, drawing intense public reaction. Some
reports indicate up to 50,000 people viewed the body.
Emmett Till was buried September 6 in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip,
Illinois. The same day, Bryant and Milam were indicted in Mississippi
by a grand jury. An investigation involving unprecedented cooperation
between local law enforcement, the NAACP, and local reporters
was cut short. On September 19, the trial began; on September
23 the jury, made up of 12 white males, acquitted both defendants.
Deliberations took just 67 minutes; one juror said they took a
"soda break" to stretch the time to over an hour. The
hasty acquittal outraged people throughout the United States and
Europe, and energized the nascent civil rights movement.
In a 1956 article in Look magazine for which they were
paid, J.W. Milam admitted that he and his brother had killed Till.
They did not fear being tried again for the same crime because
of the double jeopardy right. Milam claimed that initially, their
intention was to scare Till into line by pistol-whipping him and
threatening to throw him off of a cliff. Milam claimed that regardless
of what they did to Till, he never showed any fear, never seemed
to believe they would really kill him, and maintained a completely
unrepentant, insolent and defiant attitude toward them concerning
his actions. Thus, the brothers felt they were left with no choice
but to fully make an example of Till. A year later, the magazine
returned to the story, indicating that Milam and Bryant had been
shunned by the community, and that their stores were closed due
to lack of business.
Milam died of cancer in 1980, and Bryant died of cancer in 1990.
Mamie (as Mamie Till Mobley) outlived them, dying at age 81 on
January 6, 2003. That same year her autobiography "Death
of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America"
(One World Books, co-written with Christopher Benson) was published.
National media attention surrounding the young man's death, the
trial and the inevitable acquittal of Till's killers, would have
a broad effect on civil rights that no one could have imagined
or predicted in becoming a key factor in the explosive year that
launched the modern Civil Rights Movement.
Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till (July 25, 1941 - August 28,
1955) was an African-American teenager from Chicago, Illinois
who was brutally lynched in a region of Mississippi known as the
Mississippi Delta near the small town of Drew in Sunflower County.
His murder was one of the key events which energized the nascent
American Civil Rights Movement. Although the main suspects for
the crime were acquitted, a federal investigation into his murder
was initiated in 2004.
Popular culture
The murder of Emmett Till was felt deeply by African-Americans,
civil rights activists and many others. Artistic works drawing
on the incident include the first play by eventual Nobel laureate Toni Morrison,
a poem by Langston Hughes, and a
song by Bob
Dylan called "The Death of Emmett Till."
The James Baldwin play
"Blues
for Mister Charlie" is also loosely based on the case.
Recent fictionalized accounts include two award-winning novels:
Bebe Moore Campbell's
Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) and Lewis Nordan's
Wolf Whistle (1993).
The 2003 rap song "Through the Wire" by
Kanye West
uses the image of Till's mutilated face as a simile for West's physical appearance
after a near-fatal car accident, demonstrating that after fifty
years the murder is still firmly entrenched in the public memory.
The 2005 rap music video "Cadillacs
On 22s" by David Banner shows Banner
wearing a black T-shirt with the words "R.I.P. Emmett Till" Printed
on it.
In 2005, the play The
State of Mississippi and the Face of Emmett Till premiered
in the south for the first time at Dillard University
in New Orleans. The show, written by David Barr, was performed
again in October (as The Face Of Emmett Till) with a different
cast at Coppin State University.
Federal investigation
In 1996,
Keith Beauchamp started
background research for a feature film he planned to
make about Till's murder, and discovered that as many as 14 individuals
may have been involved. While conducting interviews he also encountered
eyewitnesses who had never spoken out publicly before. As a result
he decided to produce a documentary instead,
and spent the next nine years creating The Untold Story of
Emmett Louis Till. The film led to calls by the NAACP and others for the case to
be reopened.
On May
10, 2004,
the United
States Department of Justice announced that it was reopening
the case to determine whether anyone other than Milam and Bryant
was involved. Although the statute of limitations
prevented charges being pursued under federal law, they could
be pursued before the state court, and the Federal Bureau
of Investigation and officials in Mississippi worked jointly
on the investigation. As no autopsy had been performed on
Till's body, it was exhumed from the suburban Chicago
cemetery where it was buried on May 31, 2005, and the Cook County coroner then conducted
the autopsy. The body was reburied by relatives on June 4.
On August
26, 2005
the Jackson Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi announced that
the exhumed body had been positively identified as that of Emmett
Till.
Possible defendants in the reopening
of the case include Carolyn Donham, ex-wife of Roy Bryant, and
Henry Lee Loggins, the now 82-year-old former plantation worker
who is currently living in an Ohio nursing home.
In August
2005, a 38-mile stretch
of U.S. Highway 49 north
from Tutwiler, Mississippi to Greenwood, Mississippi
was renamed in honor of Till.
See also
References
- The Emmett Till Murder, definitive
site on the case by Devery S. Anderson
- The Murder of Emmett Till. American Experience
- Transcript and additional materials for PBS film. Accessed
May 10, 2004.
- Maria Newman (May 10, 2004). U.S.
to Reopen Investigation of Emmett Till's Murder in 1955.
The New York Times.
Accessed May 10, 2004.
- Lynching
victim's body reburied, CNN.com June 4, 2005
- Gary Younge, The Guardian, 6 June 2005, "Justice
at last?"
- Stephen Whitfield, A Death in the Delta (1988 book)
- Keith Beauchamp, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till" (2004
documentary)
- M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, The Emmett Till Book (2005) ISBN
1-4116-3843-3
- M. Susan Orr-Klopfer, Where Rebels Roost: Mississippi Civil
Rights Revisited (2005) ISBN
1-4116-4102-7
- Body
identified as Emmett Till, sciencedaily.com press release,
August 26, 2005.
External links
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