A Boy from Chicago: Emmett Till, 1955
The American South held millions in a type of agricultural bondage. Whites and blacks left their lives as sharecroppers and tenant farmers for the promise of work in factories. Some people moved less than a hundred miles from rural homes to the larger county seat towns and cities. Others traveled much farther, taking the train from southern rural Mississippi up to cities like Detroit and Chicago. For most, leaving the South was a permanent situation. They said their goodbyes with little intention of ever returning to the place of their birth and upbringing. As people settled, married, and had children in northern cities, it was not uncommon to send their young folks south to spend the summer with aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents. Emmett Till was one such young folk.
After the Second World War, Chicago was a booming town. People of all ethnicities and color filled in the city’s boundaries established in 1893. Factories were once again making consumer goods and steel mills were working at full output. Urban and suburban kids rushed to the Maxwell Street Market on Sunday mornings to listen to artists with Chess Records jam in a sort of continuation of their Saturday night gigs. Despite all of its problems with racism, segregation, and neighborhood conflicts, Chicago was a good place to be.
Mamie Carthan moved to Chicago from the Mississippi Delta with her parents when she was two years old. In 1940, against her parent’s wishes, she married a man from New Madrid, Missouri, Louis Till. Mamie gave birth to Emmett on July 25, 1941. The marriage was fraught with violence. Mamie obtained a restraining order and divorced Till. When Till repeatedly violated the restraining order, he was given the choice between prison or enlisting in the US Army. Till chose the Army, and eventually, he was court-martialed for raping women while serving in Italy. Till’s sentence was death by hanging. He was hanged on July 2, 1945. The accounts of Louis Till’s crimes, court-martial, and death were concealed from the family. They were revealed during a murder trial in 1955.
Emmett Till, 14, went to Mississippi to visit relatives during the summer of 1955. He arrived in Money, Mississippi on August 21st. The following Sunday, Emmett skipped church with his cousin. They, along with some local boys, went to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to get candy. Roy Bryant, 24, and his wife, Carolyn, 21, owned and operated the store that served mostly the sharecropping population. Blacks were not barred from the store, but local custom stated that they were not permitted to speak to white folks unless spoken to first.
What happened between Till and Carolyn Bryant inside the store is unclear. Till’s mother stated that her son had difficulty speaking at times, particularly “b” sounds. To alleviate his sometimes stuttering, Till would whistle. Carolyn Bryant went on record stating that as she was stocking candy in the store, Till stated, “How about a date, baby?” She then claimed that Till began to make advances toward her stating that she should “not be afraid of me, baby” as he had been with “white women before.”
Between 2 and 3 am on August 28, 1955, three days after Till’s encounter with Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant and another man went to Till’s great-uncle’s cabin and forcibly took Till. Carolyn Bryant stated that Till was indeed the boy who had accosted her, while Till’s great-aunt offered to pay the Bryants money in exchange for not taking Emmett away. After Emmett Till was taken, his whereabouts were unknown. Around August 31, 1955, two boys fishing in the Tallahatchie River found a swollen and disfigured body.
Emmett Till’s head was badly disfigured. The time his body had spent in the water increased the after death swelling. Till had been pistol-whipped and one of his eyes had dislodged from its socket. He had been shot above the right ear and he had markings on his back and hips that were consistent with being beaten. Instead of being strung up a tree, Emmett Till was weighted down with a 70-pound fan blade that was attached to his neck with barbed wire. When his body was recovered, Till was naked and wearing a silver ring with “L.T. May 25, 1943” engraved on it.
Newspapers across the country reported on the condition of Emmett Till’s body when it was discovered. The next day, an image of Till and his mother on Christmas Day, happy and smiling, was published. Readers were astonished and outraged. They sent letters to their local newspapers that ran the story about Till, proclaiming the horrors of the South. Writers proclaimed that the problem in the South was not with African Americans but with the white people that would brutally murder a teenager simply for speaking out of turn.
Mamie Till Bradley, Emmett’s mother, demanded that her son be returned to Chicago. She fought with local authorities who were determined to bury Till in Mississippi. With assistance from the NAACP, the mayor of Chicago, Richard J. Daley, and the governors of Illinois and Mississippi, Till’s body was clothed, placed in pine coffin, packed in lime, and shipped north. Mamie Bradley insisted that the entire world see what had happened to her son and held an open-casket funeral. As her son’s body continued to decompose, tens of thousands of people lined up outside of the mortuary to view the body. Thousands of people attended the funeral. Till’s body was interred on September 6, 1955, in Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois.
Shortly after Till’s body was found, a murder trial began in the county in which the body was found. Reporters who went to the trial remarked on the relaxed atmosphere of the courthouse, lending credence to the courtroom being more of a spectacle instead of a place for legal matters. To some, it seemed like a spectacle. On September 23, 1955, an all-white male jury acquitted Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam after a 67-minute deliberation.
Under oath, Carolyn Bryant stated that Emmett Till had accosted her. She testified that Till had grabbed her hand while she was stocking candy and asked her for a date. In Mississippi, and throughout the South, it was not acceptable for a black boy or man to touch a white woman. The true crime was not that Till had whistled at Bryant, but that he had touched her, which was how she was accosted. For that misstep, Till paid with his life. In 2008, Carolyn Bryant stated in an interview with a historian that she had lied under oath, and that she had not been accosted.