Emmett Till case reopened

Emmett Till story

May be old news to some, but I have never stopped wishing those who killed him were made to pay.

The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan


"Twas down in Mississippi no so long ago,
When a young boy from Chicago town stepped through a Southern door.
This boy's dreadful tragedy I can still remember well,
The color of his skin was black and his name was Emmett Till.

Some men they dragged him to a barn and there they beat him up.
They said they had a reason, but I can't remember what.
They tortured him and did some evil things too evil to repeat.
There was screaming sounds inside the barn, there was laughing sounds out on the street.

Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst a bloody red rain
And they threw him in the waters wide to cease his screaming pain.
The reason that they killed him there, and I'm sure it ain't no lie,
Was just for the fun of killin' him and to watch him slowly die.

And then to stop the United States of yelling for a trial,
Two brothers they confessed that they had killed poor Emmett Till.
But on the jury there were men who helped the brothers commit this awful crime,
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody seemed to mind.

I saw the morning papers but I could not bear to see
The smiling brothers walkin' down the courthouse stairs.
For the jury found them innocent and the brothers they went free,
While Emmett's body floats the foam of a Jim Crow southern sea.

If you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust,
Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust.
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow,
For you let this human race fall down so God-awful low!

This song is just a reminder to remind your fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in that ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan.
But if all of us folks that thinks alike, if we gave all we could give,
We could make this great land of ours a greater place to live.




Copyright © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music

In August 1955, a fourteen year old boy went to visit relatives near Money, Mississippi. Intelligent and bold, with a slight mischievous streak, Emmett Till had experienced segregation in his hometown of Chicago, but he was unaccustomed to the severe segregation he encountered in Mississippi. When he showed some local boys a picture of a white girl who was one of his friends back home and bragged that she was his girlfriend, one of them said, "Hey, there's a [white] girl in that store there. I bet you won't go in there and talk to her." [15] Emmett went in and bought some candy. As he left, he said "Bye baby" to Carolyn Bryant, the wife of the store owner.

Although they were worried at first about the incident, the boys soon forgot about it. A few days later, two men came to the cabin of Mose Wright, Emmett's uncle, in the middle of the night. Roy Bryant, the owner of the store, and J.W. Milam, his brother-in-law, drove off with Emmett. Three days later, Emmett Till's body was found in the Tallahatchie River. One eye was gouged out, and his crushed-in head had a bullet in it. The corpse was nearly unrecognizable; Mose Wright could only positively identify the body as Emmett's because it was wearing an initialed ring.

At first, local whites as well as blacks were horrified by the crime. Bryant and Milam were arrested for kidnapping even before Emmett's body was found, and no local white lawyers would take their case. Newspapers and white officials reported that all "decent" people were disgusted with the murder and proclaimed that "justice would be done." [16]

The Emmett Till case quickly attracted national attention. Mamie Bradley, Emmett's mother, asked that the body be shipped back to Chicago. When it arrived, she inspected it carefully to ensure that it really was her son. Then, she insisted on an open-casket funeral, so that "all the world [could] see what they did to my son." Over four days, thousands of people saw Emmett's body. Many more blacks across the country who might not have otherwise heard of the case were shocked by pictures of the that appeared in Jet magazine. These pictures moved blacks in a way that nothing else had. When the Cleveland Call and Post polled major black radio preachers around the country, it found that five of every six were preaching about Emmett Till, and half of them were demanding that "something be done in Mississippi now." [17]

Whites in Mississippi resented the Northern criticism of the "barbarity of segregation" and the NAACP's labeling of the murder as a lynching. [18] Five prominent lawyers stepped forward to defend Milam and Bryant, and officials who had at first denounced the murder began supporting the accused murderers. The two men went on trial in a segregated courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi on September 19, 1955.

The prosecution had trouble finding witnesses willing to testify against the two men. At that time in Mississippi, it was unheard of for a black to publicly accuse a white of committing a crime. Finally, Emmett's sixty-four year old uncle Mose Wright stepped forward. When asked if he could point out the men who had taken his nephew that dark summer night, he stood, pointed to Milam and Bryant, and said "Dar he" -- "There he is." Wright's bravery encouraged other blacks to testify against the two defendants. All had to be hurried out of the state after their testimony.

In the end, however, even the incredible courage of these blacks did not make a difference. Defense attorney John C. Whitten told the jurors in his closing statement, "Your fathers will turn over in their graves if [Milam and Bryant are found guilty] and I'm sure that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men in the face of that [outside] pressure." The jurors listened to him. They deliberated for just over an hour, then returned a "not guilty" verdict on September 23rd, the 166th anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Rights. The jury foreman later explained, "I feel the state failed to prove the identity of the body." [19]

The impact of the Emmett Till case on black America was even greater than that of the Brown decision. For the first time, northern blacks saw that violence against blacks in the South could affect them in the North. In Mamie Bradley's words, "Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South I said, `That's their business, not mine.' Now I know how wrong. I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all." [20] Blacks, in the North as well as in the South, would not easily forget the murder of Emmett Till.
LINK TO STORY

I heard the news today isn't it the best ever.

Why why why why why why why does it take so long?

American justice is not equal that is why.

When I was a child in Fresno in 1955, my teacher told my class the story of Emmett Till. She played a record with a song about it. She did not preach. In fact, she let us absorb the information in our own way and didn't bring up civil rights again. Fresno was already integrated, and that may be the big reason why I had been unaware of the race war that's going on. The incident made a lasting impression on me. When, a few years later, I heard of Martin Luther King and the sit ins and the bus strike, I said to myself, "It's about time." I was ignorant of most previous history of the civil rights movement; I thought it all began with King.

I am trying to remember when I first knew the Emmet Till story. Like you I was so young and in California I mostly remember the Civil Rights movement as a TV news event until Watts and then I could see the smoke from San Diego and things were more real for me.

The thing that drove it home, in Dec, 1956, we moved from Fresno to Corpus Christi, Texas, where integration was such a new thing we could still see the old system right through it. Going to other Texas towns with my uncles, I saw the black/white signs on water fountains and restrooms and saw the black people go to the rear of restaurants to get served.

The thing that really drove it home for me was when I moved to Virginia in 1976 and resturants would still close rather than serve blacks. And there were confederate flags everywhere I just didn't get it.

Tejas is bad to just not as many bars and stars round. They prefer to hide behind the Texas flag here.

I did not get to participate in civil rights demonstrations until I moved to Brooklyn, in 1968. I had too much personal baggage to occupy me until then. That was the year I went to DC with Jesse Jackson, where we finished our itinerary by joining with the Mother's March on Washington.

Jesse is the best I have marched with him many times.

My old local always held our demonstations at the SSA office at 21st and M. Jesse's office was on the 3rd floor and he always joined in. Those were some good ole times.

Did you hear about the desecration of the grave of the fellow that they dragged to death down the road in NE Tejas today? I would give you the link but cannot recall his name at this moment.

I heard mention of it on the radio. Never saw a follow up.

Here is a link to the story his name was James Byrd, Jr.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/20040511-1313-draggingdeath-desecration.html

Thanks, Joanne. Byrd's story reminds me of a man I used to do remodel work with. Our biggest customer wanted my friend to move to a small town because the customer was in the process of moving there himself. He wanted to hire my friend to work for him personally. My friend told me, "I know the people in that town don't want me there. I'm staying in Houston." In short, in the 21st Century, a black man still has to be careful where he lives.

And where he drives and in what kind of car he drives in etc., etc., etc.

A few of my brothers and sisters are filled with racism. One sister violently hates other races. So, how does karma visit her? By presenting her with a black son-in-law, and a bi-racial grandson. But, she still doesn't get it. She declares she will not be grandmother to a "zebra" and no longer communicates with her daughter.