The Blood of Emmett Till

The Blood of Emmett Till
Timothy B. Tyson (Simon and Schuster, 2017)
   In a story with as many actors and events as the civil rights movement, there are many possible ways to divide the world into 'before' and 'after', but it's fair to consider the death of Emmett Till a major one. The tale begins in 1955, in a Mississippi where black people simply did not vote or serve on juries, and where they could be harassed or killed with near-perfect impunity. "In the decades before the civil rights era, racial killings in remote corners of the Deep South frequently went unreported by the national or even the local press."

   Rumbling threats from Washington about school integration had spurred the rise of White Citizen's Councils, the professionally educated, daylight-facing counterpart of the Ku Klux Klan. If the KKK didn't burn you out or shoot at you, the Citizen's Council could cost you your livelihood - there was nothing for it, either way, but the next train north to Chicago.

   Chicago, of course, had serious limitations as an escape valve, being heavily segregated and economically unfair in its own right. Blacks could vote, and compete for industrial jobs with immigrants from Europe, but they lived in segregated enclaves, often amid a network of kinfolk from back home in the South. Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Bradley, was doing nothing unusual sending her son with her uncle on a train to Mississippi, there to enjoy his cousins' company, and help with Moses Wright's twenty-five acre cotton crop.

   The teenagers had enough free time to go fishing, or down to the store in Money, three miles away, for cold drinks. On the fateful Wednesday in late August, Emmett was alone with Carolyn Bryant, the young woman who was tending the store, for only a minute or two. Later, in court, she would testify that he grabbed her by the waist while uttering obscenities, but her lawyer's earliest notes describe his behavior as 'insulting' her, with no mention of physical contact.

   Even though he grew up in the North, fourteen-year-old Emmett surely knew the rules about dealing with white people, but he was an outgoing boy who liked making people laugh. There were no other witnesses, and the details had long since slipped Carolyn Bryant's mind when she spoke with Timothy Tyson fifty years later, but she told him something obvious: "Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him."

   That Saturday night, Bryant's husband, Roy, and his older brother, J. W. Milan, were up late playing cards and drinking. At two in the morning, they showed up at Moses Wright's house, where he and his wife and the six teen-age boys were asleep. The white men took Till away, beat the living daylights out of him, shot him in the head, tied a weight around his neck with barbed wire, and dropped him in the Tallahatchee River.

   But his feet and legs floated, and he was found by a young man who was out fishing. Though the kidnapping occurred in Leflore County, Tallahatchee County's Sheriff H. C. Strider claimed jurisdiction; he would soon tell reporters that he suspected the NAACP of planting a body and making up a story. (A ring Till was wearing, which had belonged to his father, made the identification certain.) Milan and Bryant were indicted on September 7, and went to trial on September 20th. "This left little time for a proper investigation," says Tyson, " which was the point."

   Meanwhile, however, Emmett's body had been shipped to Chicago, by a funeral home outside of Sheriff Strider's jurisdiction; and though a deal had supposedly been made to keep the coffin sealed, Emmett's mother Mamie had it opened, and allowed photographs to be published in Jet, a national magazine for Negro readers. Together with the enormous crowds that came to view the mutilated body, this meant tremendous outside interest in the trial, which drew national television cameras, and international reporters, as well as the ever-essential black press. "The very sight of white and black reporters greeting one another and exchanging notes in a friendly manner shocked the Sumner crowd. Therein was some of the trial's actual drama, for if almost everyone involved could predict the trial's verdict, few could predict its consequences."

   Under all this scrutiny, the conduct of the trial itself appeared to be fair, but no Mississippi jury was going to convict a white man for killing a black boy who had insulted his wife. In less than a week, Milan and Bryant were acquitted.

    "In 1956 the U.S. Information Agency surveyed European disdain for American race relations and found the Till case the 'prevalent' concern, though it would soon be weighed alongside mob violence at the University of Alabama and in Little Rock." White Mississippians would blame the NAACP and 'communists', which to them might as well have been the same thing, for making them look bad.

    The real question, I always think, is not 'Were there communists supporting black civil rights?' but 'Where were the Americans? Where were the Christians?' Of course, that's thinking from 'After.' The light that shone on this murder, after all the others that happened in darkness, would shine on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Improvement Association; it would shine on lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides; and it shines on the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, among so many others.