User:Moni3/EmmettTill

Early life

Emmett Till was the son of Mamie Carthan (1921–2003) and Louis Till (1922–1945). Carthan was born in the small town of Webb, Mississippi. When she was two years old, her family moved to Argo, Illinois near Chicago, where her mother's home was often used as a way-station for people who had just moved from the South as they were trying to find jobs and homes. Argo received so many Southern migrants it was nicknamed "Little Mississippi". {{citation}}: Empty citation (help) Tens of thousands of black Americans moved North between 1910 and 1970 as part of the Great Migration to escape lack of opportunity and unequal treatment under the law. Mississippi was the poorest state in the U.S. in the 1950s, and the Delta counties, located in the northwestern part of the state in the watershed of the Yazoo and Mississippi Rivers, were some of the poorest in Mississippi. In Tallahatchie County, where Mamie Carthan was born, the average income per household in 1949 was $690 (equivalent to $8,800 in 2023); for black families it was $462 (equivalent to $5,900 in 2023). Economic opportunities for black people were almost nonexistent. Most were sharecroppers who lived on land owned by whites. Black people were not allowed to vote and they had few legal rights after slavery when they were disenfranchised by Black Codes passed by the Mississippi Legislature, and Jim Crow Laws enacted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries which enforced racial segregation. {{citation}}: Empty citation (help)

Till was born in Chicago and nicknamed "Bobo" as an infant by a family friend. Mamie largely raised him with her mother; she and Louis Till separated in 1942 after she found out he had been unfaithful, and later choked her to unconsciousness, to which she responded by throwing scalding water at him. For violating court orders to stay away from Mamie, Emmett's father was forced by a judge to choose between jail or enlisting in the U.S. Army which he did in 1943, and died in 1945. At the age of six Emmett contracted polio, leaving him with a persistent stutter. Mamie and Emmett moved to Detroit where she met and married "Pink" Bradley in 1951. Emmett preferred living in Chicago, so he relocated to live with his grandmother; his mother rejoined him with his stepfather later that year. The marriage dissolved in 1952, however, and Pink Bradley returned to Detroit.

Mamie Till Bradley and Emmett lived alone together in a busy neighborhood in Chicago's South Side with extended family nearby. She began working as a civilian clerk for the U.S. Air Force for a better salary, and recalled that Emmett was industrious enough to help with chores at home although he sometimes got distracted. She remembered that he did not know his own limitations at times. Following their separation, Pink Bradley paid her a visit and began threatening her. At eleven years old, Emmett, with a butcher knife in hand, told Pink he would kill him if he did not leave. Usually, however, Emmett was happy. He and his cousins and friends pulled pranks on each other (Emmett once took advantage of an extended car ride when his friend fell asleep and placed the friend's underwear on his head) and spent their free time in pickup baseball games. He was a smart dresser and often the center of attention around his peers.

In 1955, Mamie Till Bradley's uncle, 64-year-old Mose Wright, visited them in Chicago during the summer and told Emmett stories about living in the Mississippi Delta. Wright was a sharecropper and part-time minister who was often called "Preacher". He lived in Money, Mississippi, a small town in the Delta that consisted of three stores, a school, a post office, a cotton gin, and a couple hundred residents, 8 miles (13 km) north of Greenwood. Emmett wanted to see the Delta for himself. His mother was ready for a vacation and planned to take Emmett with her, but after he begged her to visit Wright, she relented. Wright planned to accompany Till and a cousin to Money where another cousin would join them. Before his departure, Till's mother cautioned him that Chicago and Mississippi were two different worlds and he should know how to behave in front of whites in the South. He assured her he understood.

Racial segregation, which was pervasive throughout the South, was established and enforced primarily to prevent interracial romantic and sexual relationships. Although this occurred, particularly among white men and black women, the protection of white women from black men was the hinge upon which this severely divided caste system functioned. Although it rarely happened, even the suggestion of sexual contact between black men and white women carried the most severe penalties for black men. Since 1882, when statistics on lynchings began to be collected, more than 500 black Americans had been killed by extrajudicial violence in Mississippi alone and more than 3,000 across the South. The majority of the incidents took place between 1876 and 1930; though far less common by the mid-1950s, these racially motivated murders still occurred. Zealous enforcement of segregation continued following World War II and racial tensions were furthermore on the rise after the United States Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education to allow integration in public schools. Many segregationists viewed the ruling as an avenue to allow interracial marriage. The reaction among whites in the South was to constrain blacks forcefully from any semblance of social equality. A week before Till arrived, a black man named Lamar Smith was shot in front of the county courthouse in Brookhaven, Mississippi for political organizing. Three men were arrested but acquitted.

Younge, Gary (5 June 2005). "Justice at last?". The Guardian.

Murder

When Roy Bryant was told of what had transpired, he aggressively questioned several young black men who entered the store. That evening, Bryant, with a black man named J. W. Washington, approached a young black man walking along a road. Bryant ordered Washington to seize the young man, put him in the back of his pickup truck, and took him to be identified by an as-yet unnamed companion of Carolyn's who had witnessed the episode with Till. Friends or parents vouched for the young men in Bryant's store, and Carolyn's companion denied that the young man Bryant and Washington seized was the one who had accosted her. Somehow, however, Bryant learned that the young man who had done it was from Chicago and was staying with Mose Wright. They put Till in the back of a pickup truck and drove to a barn at the Clint Shurden Plantation in Drew. Till was pistol-whipped and placed in the bed of the pickup truck again and covered with a tarpaulin. Throughout the course of the night, Bryant, Milam, and witnesses recall them being in several locations with Till. According to some witnesses, they took Till to a shed behind Milam's home in the nearby town of Glendora where they beat him again and tried to decide what to do. Witnesses recall between two and four white men and two and four black men who were either in or surrounding the pickup truck where Till was seated. Others passed by Milam's shed to the sounds of someone being beaten. Accounts differ as to when Till was shot; either in Milam's shed or by the Tallahatchie River. He was driven to Bryant's store where several people noticed blood pooling in the truck bed. Bryant explained he killed a deer, and in one instance showed the body to a black man who questioned him, saying "that's what happens to smart niggers".

Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers—in their place—I know how to work 'em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain't gonna vote where I live. If they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired o' livin'. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and listened to that nigger throw that poison at me, and I just made up my mind. 'Chicago boy,' I said, 'I'm tired of 'em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I'm going to make an example of you—just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.'

—J. W. Milam, Look magazine, 1956

In an interview with William Bradford Huie in Look magazine in 1956, Bryant and Milam stated that their intention was to beat Till and throw him off an embankment into the river to frighten him. They told Huie that while they were beating Till, however, he called them bastards, declared he was as good as they, and had in the past had sexual encounters with white women. They then put Till in the back of their truck, drove to a cotton gin to take a 70-pound (32 kg) fan—the only time they admitted to being worried, thinking that by this time in early daylight they would be spotted and accused of stealing—and drove for several miles along the river looking for a place to dispose of Till. They shot him by the river and weighted his body with the fan.

Mose Wright stayed on his front porch for 20 minutes waiting for Till to return. He did not go back to bed. He and another man went into Money, got gasoline, and drove around trying to find Till. Unsuccessful, they returned home by 8:00 am. After hearing from Wright he would not call the police because he feared for his life, Curtis Jones placed a call to the Leflore County sheriff and another to his mother in Chicago, who, hysterical, called Mamie Till Bradley. Wright and his wife also drove to Sumner, where Elizabeth Wright's brother contacted the sheriff.

Bryant and Milam were questioned by Leflore County sheriff George Smith. They admitted they had taken the boy from his great-uncle's yard, but claimed they had released him the same night in front of Bryant's store. Bryant and Milam were arrested for kidnapping. Word got out that Till was missing and soon Medgar Evers, Mississippi state field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and Amzie Moore, head of the NAACP's Bolivar County chapter, became involved, disguising themselves as cotton pickers to speak safely with field workers who might know any information to find Till.

Three days after his abduction, Till's swollen and disfigured body was found by two boys fishing in the Tallahatchie River. His head was very badly damaged, he had been shot above the right ear, an eye was dislodged from the socket, there was evidence that he had been beaten on the back and the hips, and his body was weighted to the fan blade, fastened around his neck with barbed wire. He was nude, but wearing a silver ring with the initials "L. T." and "May 25, 1943" carved in it.

Confusion about Till's whereabouts and a positive identification of the body retrieved from the river compounded issues in the case that eventually influenced the trial. Hodding Carter in the Delta Democrat-Times, a local Mississippi newspaper, reported that Till may have been hidden by his relatives or perhaps returned to Chicago for his safety. The body's face was unrecognizable due to trauma and the result of being submerged in water. Mose Wright was called to the river and identified Till. The silver ring Till wore was removed and returned to Wright, and further passed to the district attorney. Stories from witnesses, both black and white, conflict about whether the ring was on Till's body and who knew he had worn it previously.

Further reading

• Anderson, Devery S. (July 2008). "A Wallet, a White Woman, and a Whistle: Fact and Fiction in Emmett Till's Encounter in Money, Mississippi". The Southern Quarterly (PDF).
• Burch, Audra D. S.; Shastri, Veda; Chaffee, Tim (February 20, 2019). "Emmett Till's Murder, and How America Remembers Its Darkest Moments". The New York Times.
• Houck, Davis W. (Summer 2005). "Killing Emmett". Rhetoric & Public Affairs. 8 (2): 225–262. doi:10.1353/rap.2005.0078. S2CID 201795757 – via Project MUSE.
• Huie, William Bradford (January 1957). "What's Happened to the Emmett Till Killers?". Look. Archived from the original on May 16, 2017. Retrieved February 25, 2019.
• Shastri, Veda; Burch, Audra D. S.; Chaffee, Tim; Fineman, Nicole (February 21, 2019). "Remembering Emmett Till: The Legacy of a Lynching". The New York Times.
• Shastri, Veda (February 22, 2019). "A Grocery, a Barn, a Bridge: Returning to the Scenes of a Hate Crime". The New York Times.
• Emmett Till at Curlie
• The original 1955 Jet magazine with Emmett Till's murder story pp. 6–9, and Emmett Till's Legacy 50 Years Later" in Jet, 2005.
• NPR pieces on the Emmett Till murder
• Booknotes interview with Christopher Benson on Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, April 25, 2004.
• Testimony of Carolyn Bryant at trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam