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The Hate Crime that Changed America The Reverend Dr. Becky Edmiston-Lange, August 28, 2005 When Mamie Till first saw her fourteen-year-old son’s mutilated body, her first thought was that it didn’t even appear human, that it looked like something from outer space. A feeling of pure horror came over her. But Mamie had a job to do that no one else could do—she had to confirm that this body had once been her son. And so, steeling herself against her emotions, she diverted her eyes down to the feet. That’s how she would proceed, she decided—from his feet to his head—she couldn’t bear to examine his face, not yet. She would have to let her courage build as she moved slowly up his body. And so Mamie began examining Emmett’s ankles, his calves, his knees,… Yes, those were his ankles, his knees—knees just like hers. Part by part she examined her son’s body, willing herself not to lose control. She had to know this was Emmett, every last bit of him. As she worked her way up, Mamie noticed that none of Emmett’s body was scarred—it was bloated, the skin was loose, but there were no signs of violence anywhere—until she got to Emmett’s face. And there she saw that his tongue, huge, engorged, rested on his chin as if it had been choked out. One of his eyeballs rested on his cheek, suspended only by the optic nerve. The other eye was gone completely. All but two of his teeth were missing; his nose obliterated. Mamie felt another wave of anguish, but still she forced herself to move on, one small section at a time, as she tracked her son’s night of torture. She looked for his right ear, saw the bottom half of it was gone. And then she saw that someone had taken a hatchet and had cut through the entire top of his head, from ear to ear. But it was when Mamie noticed light shining through the bullet hole that ran from one temple through to the other side, that Mamie’s control was broken. It was then she finally spoke: “Did they have to shoot him?” she asked. What she meant was—surely he was dead by then. It was exactly fifty years ago today—early Sunday morning, August 28, 1955, that Mamie Till had received the phone call that her son, Emmett, was missing—that in the middle of the night men had come and taken Emmett from his uncles’ house in Money, Mississippi where he had been visiting his southern relatives. It was now Friday, September 2. The days intervening had been harrowing for Mamie and others waiting back in Chicago. At first there had been some hope that Emmett might still be alive—the men who took him claimed to have let him go. But then late on August 31st, Mamie learned that Emmett’s body had been found submerged in the Tallahatchie River, a heavy cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His uncle, Moses Wright, had been called to the sight to identify his nephew, but he had seen nothing he could recognize except a ring on one finger. It had belonged to Emmett’s father, a serviceman killed in WWII. Once Moses said yes, he did believe this was his nephew, the local sheriff had called in a black undertaker, with the instructions—“Get that body in the ground immediately!” But Mamie wanted to bury her son herself in Chicago. Racing against time, and at Mamie’s great expense, a large Chicago black funeral home was able to have the body shipped to Chicago—albeit locked up with the seal of the State of Mississippi which was not supposed to be broken. Mamie, however, had insisted on seeing the body—she had to be sure it was her son and not just a load of delta mud in that big box. And now, as Mamie stood examining her son’s body, imagining what it must have been like for him that night, she made a decision that would help change the course of history. She turned to Mr. Rayner, the funeral director, and said that she wanted an open-casket funeral. “Are you sure?,” he questioned. “Don’t you want me to fix him up a little, make him more presentable?” “No,” Mamie said, “Let the world see what I’ve seen.” Emmett Till’s murder might have been just another lynching—one of those hundreds, thousands of other cases where families quietly buried their dead, swallowing their grief and their rage, one of those hundreds, thousands of cases of terrorism meant to keep the Negro in his place—but for Mamie’s decision that day in that funeral home. As it was, Mr. Rayner did “fix up” Emmett’s face somewhat—he removed the tongue and the offending eyeball, closed the mouth and eyelids, roughly sewed the pieces of Emmett’s head back together. The face seen by the public—as many as a 100 thousand people filed by Emmett’s casket over the course of four days, one in five of them swooning at the sight—the face seen in the famous Jet magazine photograph, the photograph seared as their “cautionary tale” on the memories of an entire generation of African Americans—was not the same face Mamie had seen. And yet it was horrible enough to send shock waves of outrage throughout the nation, horrible enough to ensure that there would be indictments for murder, and that the press would descend in unprecedented numbers to Sumner, Mississippi to cover the trial. Mamie’s decision to have an open casket made the whole nation bear witness. The murder of Emmett Till and the trial of the two men accused of murdering him became the first great media event of the civil rights movement. And yet the trial itself was almost a sham. Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Milam, admitted taking Emmett from his uncle Moses Wright’s house in the middle of the night on August 28. According to them, Emmett had made an advance toward Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, at the Bryant’s country store three days before and they were simply going to teach the young man a lesson about the proper respect toward Southern white women. The two claimed to have whipped Emmett and then let him go. Incredibly, there was no official investigation into the murder and Bryant’s and Milam’s defense consisted of casting doubts on the identity of the body pulled from the river. One of the defense attorneys—all five layers in town had offered their services pro bono—even went so far to claim that Moses Wright and the NAACP had robbed a grave to find a body to throw into the river with Emmett’s ring, that Emmett was alive and well back up in Chicago. And while Carolyn Bryant’s inflammatory testimony was not heard outright by the jury—testimony in which she accused Emmett of asking her for a date, chasing her around the store and whistling at her later as she crossed from the store to her car—it was vetted in open court and was a hot topic of talk in the town. Moreover, witnesses for the prosecution mysteriously—and conveniently for the defense—disappeared. And throughout the trial the two defendants seemed totally unconcerned, at times dandling their children on their knees. It took the all white male jury—there were no blacks registered to vote in the county and women were not allowed to serve on juries in Mississippi until 1970—less than an hour, including a coke break, to return a verdict of acquittal. It almost seemed preordained. Nevertheless, there were moments of high drama and great bravery during the trial. When Moses Wright, Emmett’s uncle, was asked to identify the men who took Emmett from his home, Moses, in a proud gesture of defiance, stood up and, pointed directly at the two defendants. It was the first time in nearly a century that a black man had testified against a white man in a Mississippi court of law. Further on, there was the testimony of Willie Reed, an eighteen-year-old black man who testified that he had seen Emmett with six men in a pickup truck the night of the 28th and later had seen that same pickup truck parked outside a tractor shed from which he heard the sounds of a beating and screams. Willie testified that when he heard the screams he had hidden and thus observed J. W. Milam go in and out of the shed, and that, later still, something wrapped in a tarpaulin was thrown into the back of the truck before it was driven off. After the trial both Moses Wright and Willie Reed had to flee Mississippi in fear for their lives. Indeed, during the trial, Moses slept in the woods outside his house—on two occasions men had came in the middle of the night looking for him. And when Willie first stepped into the courthouse and was escorted to the judge’s chambers for the judge to preview his testimony, there, seated with their feet up on the Judge’s desk, were Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. If there were any doubt that the trial was a miscarriage of justice, that doubt was dispelled when Bryant and Milam were interviewed by Look magazine a few months later. In that interview, for which they were paid $4000, they admitted killing Emmett. They said that, at first, they had only meant to beat him up, scare him and then let him go. It was Emmett’s behavior, they claimed, which left them no choice but to murder him. They described Emmett as uncowed, refusing to cry out, continuing to brag of his white female conquests, behavior that they just could not countenance in, as they said, “a nigger.” Milam was quoted as saying, “When a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired of living.” The portrait of Emmett offered by Milam and Bryant in the Look interview was undoubtedly a distortion meant to justify their actions. Emmett knew better. In fact, Mamie had carefully schooled her son in proper deference before she allowed him to make the trip to Mississippi, telling him not to ever look a white woman in the eye, to always humble himself, to get down on his knees if he had to. And Emmett’s cousins, who were with him that day at the Bryant store, consistently maintained that the alleged incident with Carolyn Bryant never happened. But, of course, their testimony was never heard. However, this distorted portrait of Emmett as a brash, sexualized young man certainly reveals something of the mindset of his killers and also, perhaps, that of their acquitters. Years later a white Tallahatchie County resident, Hugh Whitaker, would write his masters thesis on the Emmett Till trial. As a white insider, he was able to talk to most of the key people involved. According to Whitaker’s interviews, the jurors didn’t doubt that Milam and Bryant had killed Emmett. They heard one thing that was important to them—a white woman’s claim that a black boy had insulted her. They said that was all they needed to hear. However Emmett behaved, it is apparent that Emmett’s murder was part of a pattern of violence—a murder meant to send a message of white power and control. Mississippi had always been the worst of the Southern states for blacks. There were more lynchings there than anywhere. But when the Supreme Court ruled segregation illegal in 1954 and then in May 1955 that states had to start desegregating “with all deliberate speed,” things had heated up, especially in the Delta. White Citizens Councils were re-energized. Blacks were fired from their jobs, evicted from their farms, their mortgages foreclosed, just for trying to register to vote. All five of the candidates running for Governor in that year’s primary campaigned against desegregation. Then in May the Reverend George Lee who was heading up a registration drive in Belzoni, Mississippi, was shot while he was driving his car. The sheriff ruled the cause of death an auto accident. Just two weeks before Emmett’s visit, Lamar Smith, a WWII veteran, who was urging blacks to register, was gunned down in broad daylight on the courthouse lawn in Brookhaven, Mississippi. A dozen witnesses didn’t see a thing. Emmett might not have been a civil rights organizer or involved in any of the activities that threatened white supremacy, but as a Northern Negro with a little money to spend and a certain amount of confidence that came from growing up in the less oppressive north, Emmett was a provocative target. White power had to be protected at all costs. Racist whites didn’t want “their” Negroes getting any uppity ideas. Emmett’s murder was the most brazen example of how far certain elements were willing to go in their reign of hatred. And Bryant’s and Milam’s acquittal was a blatant example of just how entrenched and systemic was racial injustice. Emmett’s death was a lynching meant to send a message, but what Bryant and Milam and their co-conspirators—and there were most certainly others involved—didn’t count on was Mamie Till and her decision to share her anguish publicly. Mamie’s decision to let the world see what she had seen—to rip off the veil and expose the ugly face of racial hatred—set in motion a chain of events that would galvanize the civil rights movement. The not-guilty verdict sent a shock wave around the world. And, in the days following, as Mamie continued to speak out, traveling throughout the country, sharing her pain, people were moved to action in ways they hadn’t been before. Rosa Parks later testified that when she refused to move on that bus in Montgomery, she was thinking about Emmett—that, yes she was tired, but not tired from working so much as tired of being denied, beaten down, terrorized. Medgar Evers channeled his frustration and pain at Emmett’s death to redouble his efforts to mobilize black voters in Mississippi, activity which eventually resulted in his own death. And Emmett’s murder gave Martin Luther King, Jr., the great social prophet himself martyred to the cause, an irresistible symbol for the drive for equality and justice. When the historic March on Washington was planned, it was the anniversary of Emmett’s death that was chosen for that seminal event. Because of Mamie’s decision, Emmett’s death, as horrible and as hate-filled as it was, helped transform lives. Certainly his mother’s life was never the same. Before Emmett’s death, Mamie had been largely dependent on others—her mother, even her son—for direction and strength, but with Emmett’s death, something moved in her, something she attributed to the presence of God, which enabled her to endure the horror, to stand when others would have bent. As Al Sharpton said of her, “The easiest thing would have been to say, ‘No, close the casket. I can’t bear it.’ But she somewhere found the strength to say, ‘I’ll bear the pain to save some other mother from having to go through this’ and because she put the picture of this young man’s body on the conscience of America, she saved thousands of young black men and women’s lives.” Mamie continued to speak her truth in the days and years following. She inspired countless others in the cause of equality and remained active in social justice movements until her death two years ago at the age of 81. She was motivated by Emmett’s death also to, as she said, “do something with her life” and so she went back to school, received a teaching degree, and went on to impact hundreds of lives in that manner also. She was, as one of her students said, “The teacher you always remembered—you know, the one who changed our lives.” There are still so many unanswered questions in the Emmett Till case. A new documentary, “The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till” by film maker Keith Beauchamp, is showing this week at the New York Film Forum to mark the anniversary of Emmett’s death. Beauchamp spent the last nine years investigating the Till murder. What he has uncovered reveals that there were as many as 14 people involved, five of whom are still alive. Because of Beauchamp’s findings, the U.S. Justice Department has reopened an investigation into Till’s death. In June of this year federal investigators exhumed Emmett’s body to test for DNA evidence. The world may finally know what really happened that day in the Bryant store and what happened that horrible night of August 28. There may yet be a kind of justice in this case. Mamie Till’s long dream was that someday the full truth of Emmett’s death would be exposed. She and Keith Beauchamp became good friends and allies over the course of his investigation. Mamie knew that there was a possibility of a federal investigation, but died before that became a reality. There will be those who question why an investigation now—why do we need to reopen this old wound? Maybe the answer lies in the fact that the wound has never really healed; because the forces that killed Emmett Till, though much diminished, are sadly still with us. On June 16, 2000, the body of Raynard Johnson, a seventeen-year-old black boy was found hanging from a tree in Kokomo, Mississippi. Johnson had been open about his relationship with two white girls. Though his death was ruled a suicide by the local coroner, all the evidence pointed to a lynching. He had showed no signs of depression; the braided belt around his neck was not one the family recognized; his feet were still on the ground, his legs bent sightly at the knees. At a press conference devoted to hate-crimes legislation a month after the killing, Congressman John Conyers observed, “In that part of Mississippi, that particular image of a young black man sends a specific message to a community. Events surrounding Johnson’s death have raised the specter of a racial hate crime reminiscent of Emmett Till.” Emmett’s face still haunts us. The events of August 28, 1955, in Money, Mississippi, still go unanswered. Fifty years later what can we say about the meaning of Emmett Till’s death? It is a two-sided legacy. His is the haunting story of the work that remains undone—the work of truth, and justice, of reconciliation and love. But his is also the story of the possibilities before us and a lesson for the journey—a lesson no more potent than in the person of his mother, Mamie Till. For the remarkable thing, the heart and soul inspiring thing, is that, rather than be consumed by sorrow, eaten up by bitterness, Mamie transformed her pain into something redemptive. In the last months of her life, Mamie said that not a day had gone by when she didn’t think of Emmett, and that yes, even decades later, the tears still flowed freely some days. But she had determined early on that she would not be consumed by hatred, that same destructive force that had driven Emmett’s killers. Her last public appearance, a month before her death, was at a forum in opposition to the death penalty sponsored by Murder Victim’s Families for Reconciliation. Mamie Till said that she discovered her reason for being in Emmett’s death—to bring hope from despair, joy from anguish, forgiveness from anger, love from hate—that so much good came out of Emmett’s death. Emmett’s horrible death transformed her life, but she in turn transformed that brutal murder into something redemptive, for herself, for the nation. Let us pray: May we, on this anniversary of Emmett Till’s death, be inspired to not avert our eyes from the hard truths, to not deny the painful facts of our common existence, but rather to turn the pain of our own lives and the pain we see in the lives around us, both near and far, to fuel our desire for more love, more hope, more peace—not just for ourselves, but for all people. May we never doubt the power of one person to tip the scales when love and justice hang in the balance; and thus may we be empowered to add the stubborn ounces of our weight to the side of healing, the s ide of redemption. May we keep on in the hope for a better day, the courage to fight for it, our faith that it eventually will come. With joy may we help lead the way to that great somewhere, someday, when all the world will be transformed to a place of safety and freedom for all. Amen. Main Sources: Christopher Metress, The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press, 2002. Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America, New York, Ballantine Books, 2003. Democracy Now, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till: New Documentary Uncovers Evidence in 1955 Murder, transcript of broadcast June 15, 2005. |
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