Seeds of Change in Mississippi

How we became a different nation 50 years after the racially charged murder of Emmett Till.

By Sean Cameron, Princeton University

August marks the 50th anniversary of the lynching of Emmett Till. It hasn’t gone unnoticed by lawmakers. The United States Senate has passed a resolution apologizing for its failure to stop lynching after Reconstruction – though a number of conservative Senators refused to cosponsor it. The Justice Department also recently reopened the Till case itself to determine whether additional people were involved in the murder – settling unfinished business that began in a Mississippi courtroom fifty years ago. Filmmaker Keith Beauchamp played a central role in motivating lawmakers with his new documentary, "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," which unearthed new evidence in the case. Campus Progress screened the film for a consortium of colleges in Atlanta and hosted a screening in DC on June 28.

In 1955, whites in Mississippi received no more of a sentence for killing blacks than they would for killing a deer out of season. Racism and bigotry were fundamentals of southern life, with blacks subjected to Jim Crow laws denying them basic human rights. And in the nation’s capitol, President Dwight Eisenhower, preoccupied with the threat of communism, did little to improve race relations in the South. As one of his contemporaries noted, “President Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man, but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German today.” Eisenhower believed that change had to come from within the South, and he seemed to be patiently awaiting that day. Yet, the 1955 murder of young African American Emmett Till and the acquittal of his two white murderers caused unrest across the nation, despite the government’s apathy, Mississippi’s negligence, and a long history of accepted African-American lynching and injustice.

Though the Emmett Till verdict made a black mark on American society and law, it nonetheless sparked change in Mississippi. Like so many other lynchings across the South, the August 28, 1955, murder of Till might have gone unnoticed. According to white Southerners, lynching was an accepted means of controlling “misbehaving” African Americans. The press rarely covered racially motivated murders: Only two weeks before the Till murder, Lamar Smith was shot to death in front of a courthouse for trying to vote; no arrests were made. However, acts of personal courage by Till’s family ensured that the Till case garnered national attention. The murder occurred only a few years after millions of blacks left the rural, isolated South for the urban communities of the North. Tightly knit communities and relative freedom from oppression in the North allowed African Americans to express themselves more easily, leading to an increase in the number of newspapers, magazines, and journals reaching out to African Americans. When Emmett Till was murdered, this large African-American press revealed all the details about the case and the verdict, rallying shocked African Americans in disgust and increasing pressure on the apathetic Eisenhower administration to address Mississippi’s race problems.

Emmett “Bobo” Till was born on July 25, 1941, near Chicago. Originally from the South, his parents had migrated northward, and Till grew up outspoken, self-assured, and often times arrogant. He did not answer the white gas station operators and storekeepers with the customary “yassah” and “nawah,” but instead said “yeah” and “naw.” In August 1955, Till went to Mississippi to visit relatives and stayed with his great-uncle Moses “Preacher” Wright. On August 24, after he had been in the South for a week, fourteen-year-old Till and several other young African Americans were outside Bryant’s Market in Money, Mississippi, playing checkers, wrestling, and telling jokes. Then, Till took a picture of some white children from his wallet, boasting that one of the girls was his girlfriend. One boy laughed saying, “You talkin’ might big, Bo. There’s a pretty little white woman in the store. Since you know how to handle white girls, let’s see you go in and get a date with her.” Till accepted the dare and entered the convenience store, where Carolyn Bryant, the store owner’s wife, was working at the counter. Till bought two cents worth of gum. A 1956 article in Look magazine reported that Till then boldly asked Bryant for a date, squeezing her hand. (Till’s mother later asserted that her son, who had a speech impediment, was not capable of such bold speech.) Immediately, Bryant ran out of the store to grab a pistol from her friend’s car. Till’s cousin ushered him from the store. Till then whistled, and he and his friends ran away from Bryant’s Market.

Roy Bryant had been out of town that Wednesday but returned Friday night. When his wife told him about the incident in the convenience store, Bryant felt obligated to “whip the nigger’s ass.” So, on Saturday at 10:30 p.m., he asked his half-brother, J.W. Milam, to help him “whip [Till] … and scare some sense into him.” “Big” Milam stood six feet two inches, weighed 235 pounds, and was known for his ability to “handle” African Americans. He and Bryant went to Preacher Wright’s house that night, and after confronting Wright, they asked to see Till. Despite Wright’s pleading, Milam and Bryant took Till from the house and forced him to lie in the back of their pickup truck. They drove Till to Milam’s tool house, threatening his life along the way. Yet, according to Milam, he and Bryant were “never able to scare [Till].” At the tool house, Milam and Bryant whipped and beat Till, still taunting him. Though Till was badly bruised, he remained cocky, unaware of the Southern code of unquestionable black obedience toward whites, allegedly saying, “You bastards, I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are. I’ve ‘had’ white women.” Then, Milam and Bryant drove Till to the Tallahatchie River. They asked him again if he was still as good as they were. When Till answered affirmatively, Milam took out his shotgun, later commenting that “when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him.” Milam told Till, “I’m gonna make an example of you just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.” Then, Milam shot Till in the back of the head. Till fell to the ground. Milam and Bryant took a 74-pound cotton gin fan from the back of their truck and tied it around Till’s neck. They rolled him into the water and drove away just before dawn.

When Preacher Wright heard about Till, he went to the Tallahatchie to identify the body. Wright cringed upon seeing the corpse, for it was so mutilated that the only way he could identify it was by Till’s initialed ring. The police contacted Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley. Though the police wanted an immediate burial, Mrs. Bradley demanded that the corpse be sent to Chicago. She fainted upon seeing her battered son, but later cried out, “The entire state of Mississippi is going to pay for this. [I want] the world [to] see what they did to my boy.” In protest, Mrs. Bradley had an open casket funeral for Till, during which thousands viewed the corpse. Still more saw the picture of Till’s mutilated body in Jet. Mrs. Bradley’s mission to expose the atrocities of the murder succeeded. Blacks and whites who viewed the picture were shocked; one viewer asked, “How could they do that to him? He’s only a boy.” State Representative Charles Diggs claimed that the picture “was probably the greatest media product in the last forty or fifty years … That picture stimulated a lot of … anger on the part of blacks all over the country.” Civil rights leader James Forman recalled the “the vicious killing [had made] black people all over the country … angry … but also frightened.” A South Carolina man remembered his community’s reaction:

There was something about the cold-blooded callousness of Emmett Till’s lynching that touched everyone in the community … People continued to discuss it. It was impossible to go into a barber shop or grocery store without hearing someone deplore Emmett Till’s lynching.

As news of Till’s murder spread, court proceedings against his alleged killers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, finally began on September 19 with several national newspapers and magazines, including Time, Life, Newsweek, and The Nation, covering the trial. Northern black publications, including The Chicago Defender, New York’s Amsterdam News, Ebony, Crisis, and Jet, also sent journalists down to Sumner, Mississippi, where the trial took place. Furthermore, the three major television networks of the time sent their film crews down to Sumner. Angry and confused by the publicity that the lynching received, whites pointed out that Till’s lynching was nothing new.

Most people did not think that Bryant or Milam would be convicted. The all-white jury represented anything but a microcosm of Tallahatchie County’s 63% African-American community. Prosecutors argued that since the alleged murderers admitted to kidnapping Till, they had to have killed him as well. Preacher Wright, who was one of the few blacks in the courtroom, took the stand despite great personal risk. When he stood up to identify the two kidnappers, Wright stated in a loud, clear voice, “Thar he!”, pointing to Milam and then Bryant. Wright sent the message that he would no longer accept injustice without speaking out. Still, the defendants had the final say in the case. In fact, neither the jury nor the judge ever seemed to care about the prosecutors’ arguments. As one noted, “the laxity in the courtroom was something you couldn’t imagine … They drank beer in the jury box”. On September 23, after an hour and seven minutes of deliberation, the jury acquitted Milam and Bryant. Mr. Shaw, the spokesman for the jurors, commented on the jury’s reasons for acquittal:

The principal item that led to the verdict was the belief that there had been no identification of the body as that of Emmett Till … The body was too badly decomposed to be identified … beyond a reasonable doubt as Till.

Milam and Bryant walked out of the courtroom with their wives in hand, posing for photographers and lighting up cigars. The case was over, but the repercussions were just beginning.

Many Americans expressed anger with the decision. In large cities, major organizations held protests including a crowd of 10,000 in Harlem the Sunday after the acquittal. NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins called the trial “a travesty, a farce, a joke so far as it demonstrated the American principle of trial by jury to secure a just verdict.” Wilkins urged the Eisenhower administration to work to fix Mississippi’s judicial problems. He, along with David Livingston, president of District 65, condemned Mississippi as being backward looking and undemocratic. Dr. Channing Tobias, chairman of the board of the NAACP, also attacked Mississippi’s judicial system:

The jurors who returned the shameful verdict deserve a medal from the Kremlin for meritorious service in Communism’s war against democracy. They have done their best to discredit our judicial system, to hold us up as a nation of hypocrites, and to undermine faith in American democracy.

On January 24, 1956, Look Magazine published “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,” an article that elucidated the details of the Till murder. The author, William Huie, offered Milam and Bryant money to reveal what really happened to Till. Milam and Bryant accepted the offer and admitted that they were, in fact, Till’s murderers. Milam said, “Yes, we took him down there, and we beat him, and then killed him, and threw him in the Tallahatchie River.” When Huie asked Milam’s lawyer if this were true, the lawyer responded, “I don’t know whether they did it or not. I never asked them … No, none of us [lawyers] questioned them. See, all we did was defend them, which the community wanted us to do.” Huie closed his article saying that most Mississippi whites either approved of Milam and Bryant’s actions or did not disapprove enough to risk giving blacks the glory of a conviction. Indeed, in Mississippi, neither whites nor blacks spoke out against the injustices of the courtroom and society at large.

Still, despite this dramatic revelation, the Eisenhower administration did not act. Despite mounting pressure on the Justice Department to investigate the increased violence in the South, the executive branch adopted a “policy of silence” and inaction. Eisenhower claimed that “emotionalism” ran high in Mississippi, and government intrusion would only make the problem worse. But popular pressure eventually forced Eisenhower to act. In a March 4, 1956, meeting, the cabinet called for a commission to investigate claims that Mississippi blacks could not vote because of social coercion. Furthermore, an additional Assistant Attorney General would handle civil rights cases, and the commission would have the ability to enforce federal guarantees for civil rights in Mississippi. Though it took several months, the government finally responded to the Till case with reforms in Mississippi.

Despite the plodding pace of the government in dealing with the Till case, African Americans had taken the first step towards civil rights and racial justice born from fear, anger and retaliation. Amzie Moore, local NAACP president in 1955, called the Till case “the beginning of the civil rights movement in Mississippi … From that point on, Mississippi began to move.” As Mississippi “moved,” the state would not forget the atrocity of the Emmett Till story. In publicized testimony that eventually led to the Civil Rights Act of 1957, six witnesses referred to the Till case and African-American newspapers continued to clamor for black equality and freedom from oppression. In Coming of Age in Mississippi, civil rights activist Anne Moody wrote that “before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now, there was a new fear to me – the fear of being killed just because I was black.” She remembered the first few days after the death of Till and how the murder affected her: “I hated the white men who murdered Emmett Till and I hated all the other whites for the countless murders [they had committed] … I hated [blacks] for not standing up and doing something about the murders.” Many African Americans, especially from the North, who had not experienced such extreme racism and bigotry, finally understood the need to safeguard liberty for all African Americans. 1950s civil rights leader Myrlie Evers commented that the Till lynching proved that “no Negro’s life was really safe.”

The Till case prompted Americans, both black and white, to question the American system of society and law. Racism, lynching, and judicial injustice toward blacks were no longer just black issues; they were national issues. The picture of Till’s mutilated teenage corpse in Jet Magazine and Huie’s article in Look Magazine not only angered the NAACP but also Jewish organizations and other outspoken whites like William Faulkner. The watershed moment that the Till murder marked was the result of the conflagration of a number of factors: the great Northern migration, the rise of African-American media, Mrs. Bradley’s insistence upon having an open casket funeral, and Moses Wright’s courageous “Thar he!” The case was the devastating flint that sparked the movement towards civil rights.

More on Emmett Till and racial justice from Campus Progress’s Michael Thompson – on Think Progress.

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