Emmett Till's Legacy: A Weighted Body Lifts A People

by Frederick B. Hudson

"I saw a hole-which I presumed was a bullet hole and I could look through that hole and see daylight in the other side and I wondered-"was it necessary to shoot him?"

These words begin the courageous and horrific testimony of Mrs. Mamie Till Mosely, the mother of Emmett Till, as she describes the terrible mass of unrecognizable waterlogged, smashed flesh that she viewed in a coffin sent back from the Mississippi Delta in August, 1955.

The sheriff of Money, Mississippi had instructed the undertaker in her native Chicago not to open up the casket of what he said were her son's remains-but the mother felt she had to know what she was burying in a plot designated for her fourteen year old son.

The grotesque sight of the body stirred Mrs. Mosely to show the entire world what southern racism has done to her son who had traveled to the small hamlet of Money, Mississippi only two weeks before to visit relatives. When Emmett whistled at a white woman storeowner after he purchased candy, the woman's husband and his brother-in-law took Emmett from his relatives' home in the dead of night, drove him away, beat him, gouged out an eye, shot him, tied a cotton gin fan around his neck, and threw him in the Tallahatchie, river.

The resulting international outcry focused the world's attention upon the harsh realities of the subservience Jim Crow forced upon the Negroes of the South and gave the incipient civil rights movement one of its first martyrs in the form of a fun-loving Chicago teenager.

Emmett Till's saga and subsequent impact upon history unfolds in understated majesty in The Murder of Emmett Till, produced and directed by this year's MacArthur "genius" award winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson. It will have its world premier on Thursday, December 12 in New York at the 10th Annual African Diaspora Film Festival in New York. It will be available for national viewing on Monday, January 20, 2003, at 9 p.m. on most Public Broadcasting System(PBS) stations.

Nelson does a more than adequate job of setting the context for Till's murder by showing clips for a White Citizens Council film of the time which boasts of Mississippi commitment to segregation and abhorrence of "race mixing." The filmmaker next describes the flight to the North of many Southern Negroes before World War II-including Till's mother.

When the teenaged Till was sent away for the summer, his mother told him: "If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly." But the adolescent Emmett felt the rush of his young manhood and showed his Mississippi friends a picture of a white girl from Chicago and bragged the girl was his girlfriend. On a dare Emmett went into a local candy store and whistled at the white woman whose husband owned the store, Carolyn Bryant. When the woman's husband, Roy, returned home after a long distance trucking job, he and his half-brother J.W. Milan resolved to teach the "uppity" Northern boy a lesson.

When they came for the boy after midnight the older man who was Emmett's guardian for the summer, Mose Wright, begged the white men to only whip him since he didn't know southern mores. The men told Wright that if he wanted to live another year he would cause no trouble.

Emmett's bloated body was pulled from the river three days later. It was so distorted it could only be identified by a signet ring that was passed on to Emmett by his mother-the ring was the only identifying evidence the U.S. government sent his mother after Emmett's father was killed in World War II.

When Mamie Till found out that her son was dead, and told her friends and relatives she said "it seems like the whole house screamed, that's when I knew this was a load I was going to have to carry, that I wasn't going to get any help."

But she did get help. Although in the seventy-five years prior to Till's death, more than five hundred black men had been lynched in Mississippi, Mrs. Till's location in the North made it easier to enlist help from the black press, notably the Chicago Defender. Jet magazine carried the story with a photo of the monster-like face of Till. Black preachers in their pulpits and on radio demanded justice. Congressman Charles Diggs of Michigan came to the trial in Sumner, Mississippi. The congressman was seated at a small bridge table far away from the judge's bench with Emmett's mother-this area was designated by the sheriff as "the n_ _ _ _ _ _s' table"

Thousands of dollars were raised by the white community which felt the siege of international media lights. Many citizens assigned blame for the whole ruckus on "them communists."

Nevertheless a trial was held. Mose Wright stood up in the courtroom and identified J.W. Milan with broken English, "Thar he." Another black man in the Money community with similar courage, Willie Reed, spoke of seeing Bryant and Milan driving away with Till and hearing the sounds of a beating. Both of these witnesses left Mississippi after their testimony and never came back.

The defendants were acquitted after the all white jury deliberated less than seventy-five minutes. Soon afterwards they sold their story to Look magazine and admitted killing him. Milan said that when the Till youth refused to beg for his life they knew he had to be killed. He told the Look writer: "What else could we do? He was hopeless."

But in Till's hopeless obstinacy sprang the seeds of a new unity between Southern and Northern blacks. Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field secretary of the NAACP, worked with James Hicks, a reporter for the Amsterdam News to get Mose Wright safely out of Mississippi. Diggs took Willie Reed to safety. Black leaders called for a boycott of goods produced in Misssissippi.

In the words of poetess Sonia Sanchez,a people's tongues became wrapped around truth and their feet became wrapped around freedom. Only a few months later Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus and a great and mighty walk began. The hole in Emmett Till's head let daylight in for a new day for justice.

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