Emmett Till

"Be careful. If you have to get down on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly." ~ Mamie Till Bradley

Chicagoan Emmett Till was 14 years old when he was brutally murdered while visiting relatives in the Mississippi Delta for allegedly whistling at a white woman. The following publicity made this the most widely known lynching of the twentieth century. Outrage felt by African Americans across the country was one of the causes leading to the civil rights movement, with the Rosa Parks-inspired Montgomery bus boycott beginning only months later.

Till was born July 25, 1941 to Mamie Cauthon Till from Webb, Mississippi, and Louis Till. His parents separated when he was two, and Mrs. Till married Pink Bradley in 1951, divorcing him a year later. In the summer of 1955 Mrs. Till's uncle Mose Wright was in Chicago and he took young Emmett back with him for a visit to the Delta. Mrs. Bradley was reluctant to let her son go, warning him of the differences between her home state and the life he knew in Chicago.


Till, along with his cousins and other teenagers, went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market on August 24 in Money, Mississippi, a town of only 55 people. Carolyn Bryant was working alone at the counter of the store, which catered to sharecroppers and their families. Descriptions of what happened next vary, but witnesses agree that the other boys dared Till to flirt with Mrs. Bryant. It is reported that as he left the store some heard him whistle at her. However, Till had a stutter that he could overcome by whistling. The youths left the area quickly and were afraid to tell Mose Wright what had happened.

Carolyn's husband Roy was out of town at the time. After he returned several days later he and his half-brother J. W. Milam went to Wright's cabin in the early morning hours of Sunday, August 28 and forcibly took Till away with them. They beat Till, then shot him in the head and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River tied to a 70-pound fan from a cotton gin.

Till's badly disfigured body was discovered three days later. When questioned, Bryant and Milam admitted they had taken Till from his great-uncle's house but had let him go. They were later indicted for murder by the Tallahatchie County Grand Jury. Local press coverage at first expressed shame and anger but quickly turned defensive as the story spread across the nation. Mamie Till Bradley had her son's body sent back to Chicago and insisted on an open-casket viewing. Very graphic  photographs were published in Jet magazine and The Chicago Defender.

Jury seated on first two rows.

Bryant and Milam's trial began less than a month later on September 19. The defense claimed that the body could not be positively identified. Both were acquitted a week later after an hour's deliberation by the all-male, all-white jury. In an interview with Look magazine the next year they admitted that they killed Till, with Milam saying "Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless....  '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.'"

In addition to global media coverage of the case and the wider issues of justice for African Americans, it has appeared in a number of literary works, including Bebe Moore Campbell's novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Toni Morrison's play Dreaming Emmett, and poems Afterimages by Audre Lorde, A Bronzeville Mother Loiters In Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon by Gwendolyn Brooks and Mississippi 1955 by Langston Hughes. 

                                        Mississippi—1955 (1955)
                                             by Langston Hughes


                                   Oh what sorrow!   
                                   Oh what pity!
                                   Oh, what pain
                                   That tears and blood
                                   Should mix like rain
                                   And terror come again
                                   To Mississippi.
                                   Come again?
                                   Where has terror been?
                                   On vacation? Up North?
                                   In some other section
                                   Of the nation,
                                   Lying low, unpublicized?
                                   Masked—with only
                                   Jaundiced eyes
                                   Showing through the mask?
                                   Oh, what sorrow,
                                   Pity, pain,
                                   That tears and blood
                                   Should mix like rain
                                   In Mississippi!
                                   And terror, fetid hot,
                                   Yet clammy cold
                                   Remain.

                          

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

Our country's national crime is lynching. It is not the creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. 

An outspoken crusader against lynching and one of the founders of the NAACP, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was born July 16, 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, 35 miles southwest of Memphis. She attended a local Freedman's School which is now Rust College, but dropped out to support her younger brothers and sisters by teaching after their parents died of yellow fever. She earned $30 per month although white teachers in the area were paid $80. With three younger sisters, she soon moved to Memphis where she taught and attended summer classes at Fisk University.

In 1884 she refused to move to a "Jim Crow" car on a Chesapeake & Ohio train, and was dragged from the train by the conductor and two other men while white passengers cheered. She sued the railroad and was awarded $500 in damages; the decision was overturned by the Tennessee State Supreme Court.

While teaching, she began to write about race relations for the Free Speech and Headlight, a Memphis anti-segregation newspaper, and other publications. She later became editor and co-owner of the paper. In 1892 while she was in Natchez selling newspaper subscriptions, a local grocery store owned by three African American men was attacked by white men who were resentful of its success. The owners defended the store and were arrested for shooting three of the invaders. Once in jail, they were taken out and killed.

Mrs. Wells-Barnett wrote about the lynching, and her articles appeared in newspapers across the country. She also urged African Americans to leave Memphis or, if they stayed, to boycott white businesses. She began to research lynchings and published a pamphlet Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases setting forth her finding that most were a result of minor infractions of the law or to eliminate business competition. Few were in response to rape, despite the popular belief, and she stated that most inter-racial sex was consensual. While on another out-of-town trip, the offices of the Free Speech and Headlight were destroyed, and instead of returning to Memphis she settled in Chicago.

With other leaders such as Frederick Douglass, she organized a boycott of the Chicago World's Fair and continued her research, publishing The Red Record. She wrote for the Chicago Conservator, the oldest African American newspaper in the city, and in 1895 married its former editor, Ferdinand L. Barnett, an Assistant State Attorney. 

While raising a family of four children, she continued to crusade against lynching, traveling throughout the United States and Great Britain. She also worked to improve living conditions in Chicago, and with Jane Addams blocked the segregation of the city's schools. In 1909 she was one of two African American women to sign "The Call", leading to the founding of the NAACP. 

"I had an instinctive feeling that the people who have little or no school training should have something coming into their homes weekly which dealt with their problems in a simple, helpful way... so I wrote in a plain, common-sense way on the things that concerned our people."

Walter F. White

"I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me." ~ A Man Called White, Walter F. White

Born in Atlanta, Georgia on July 1, 1883, White was one of the organizers of the Atlanta Chapter of the NAACP. In 1918, James Weldon Johnson asked him to join the national staff as Assistant National Secretary. He investigated lynchings and riots throughout the country, using his appearance -- 27 of his 32 great-great-great-grandparents were white -- to gain information about groups such as the KKK. These findings were used to support the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 1923 but defeated due a filibuster in the Senate.

In 1931 White succeeded Johnson as leader of the NAACP. He created the Legal Defense Fund under Charles Hamilton Houston, who soon recruited protege Thurgood Marshall. He also worked closely with President Truman in the 1948 desegregation of the military. He lead the NAACP until his death in 1955 and saw a five-fold increase in membership to 500,000.

White was also part of the Harlem Renaissance, writing novels Fire in the Flint, based on his experiences investigating lynchings, and Flight, on the migration of southern African Americans to the cities of the north. He also promoted the work of other writers such as poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes.