Emmett Till (1955)

I really didn't want to go to Mississippi on this trip. I wanted to skip it entirely. Pretend that it wasn't there. That nothing ever happened in that state at all.

I don't mean that literally. We pretty much had to pass through Mississippi to get from Memphis to Birmingham and I really wanted to discover some music history in Greenwood and Indianola and just a bit north of Clarksdale. But from a Civil Rights point of view, I wanted to skip it for one reason and one reason alone: because visiting Mississippi would involve dealing with what happened to Emmett Till. And I really wasn't sure I wanted to do that.

The Civil Rights Movement is littered with inhuman crimes. I am sure there are tales and legends of indiscriminate violence and senseless hate in any number of towns in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and most other states below the Mason-Dixon Line (and above it, for that matter). But what is so horrific about the killing of Emmett Till for me is the personal nature of the crime. I'm not saying any hate crime is better than another but it's one thing to plant a bomb somewhere and have it blow up and kill whomever happens to be nearby; you don't have to see the victims or personally kill them with your own hands. Emmett Till's killers tortured and killed him with weapons they wielded and they did it to a defenseless child by meting out the blows themselves from feet or inches away. They knew who and how they were going to kill before they started and they were willing to do it from close range. They would hear and smell and taste the results of what they were doing and they didn't care.

In the end as it related to this particular crime in the Civil Rights Movement, I reasoned if we were really sincere about this type of a trip, I couldn't really pass on the stuff that made me really uncomfortable. So we went to Mississippi. For Emmett Till.

Emmett was a 14 year old kid from Chicago who in the summer of 1955 managed to convince his mother to allow him to visit his cousins in Mississippi. I am sure this is a trip many, many kids made when they were younger. I know I did when I was growing up in England. Never in a million years would I even contemplate that I wouldn't come back from such a trip. But Emmett didn't.

Emmett arrived in Mississippi on August 21, 1955. He was welcomed into the home of his great-uncle (his mother's uncle), Mose Wright, a sharecropper and minister living in the town of Money, Mississippi. Three days after his arrival, Emmett and a cousin decided to skip church and head to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market to buy some candy. Carolyn Bryant, the 21 year old (white) wife of store owner Roy Bryant, was working in the store that day.

There are a number of different accounts of what happened that day inside and outside of Bryant's but two things seem certain: (1) for some time, maybe as little as one minute, Emmett was alone inside the store with Carolyn Bryant and (2) Emmett whistled at Carolyn Bryant when she exited the store after he did. I thought there was some debate about whether the whistling ever actually happened but we watched a video in the Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center (E.T.H.I.C) where his cousin, Simeon Wright, said plain as day that Emmett whistled at Carolyn. His next sentence stunned me: "It scared us half to death."

So a black kid whistled at a white woman. What's the big deal? Well, in 1950s Mississippi, that was an offense that could get you in serious trouble. It's astonishing and disgusting that a simple, really non-offensive gesture like that could get people upset enough to commit physical violence, isn't it? I mean, let it go. But this was 1950s Mississippi. And it wasn't let go. Not in any way.

A few days later, at 2:30 in the morning on August 28, two armed men (Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam) and maybe one other man burst into Mose Wright's home and demanded to see the boy who had talked to Carolyn Bryant. After identifying Emmett, being offered money to leave him alone, and telling Mose Wright that if he made any trouble he wouldn't live to see his next birthday, they took him. Emmett's family never saw him alive again. A couple of days later two boys fishing in the Tallahatchie River found Emmett's body attached to a cotton gin fan blade. The body and face was so badly mutilated that Emmett could only be identified by his father's ring, which his killers had somehow left on his body (they didn't leave anything else on his body).

Emmett Till was taken from his great-uncle's home in a green pickup truck.

If a 14 year old child being taken from his family's home in the middle of the night by two grown men and showing up dead later that same week is upsetting (and it is extremely upsetting), that's not even the half of it. This was not a simple killing. This was a hate-filled torture session of a helpless child that likely lasted hours. It is not difficult to suppose that the men who carried out this crime generated some level of satisfaction from their acts and the terrified screams of a little boy. For maybe a whistle and maybe a hand touching a hand when transferring payment for some candy when Emmett was alone inside the store. Maybe. 

There is no way to relate what happened to Emmett Till that night with any firm degree of accuracy so instead I'll write here what I wrote down after our time at E.T.H.I.C., a converted cotton gin once owned by J.W. Milam which is now a museum to document and preserve what happened to Emmett Till. The old gin is, by the way, possibly the actual building where Milam and Bryant got the fan that they used (unsuccessfully) to keep Emmett's body submerged.

There is a section of the museum that details the sequence of events of that night. There are four separate displays titled "Abduction: Home of Mose Wright", "The Truck of Torture", "The Barn" and "Glendora Cotton Gin". After abducting Emmett from his great-uncle's house, Bryant and Milam (along with two black men they forced into assisting) took Emmett to a barn on the Sheridan Plantation (owned by Milam's brother) in the nearby town of Drew and beat and tortured him and most likely killed him there. 

On the opposite wall of the museum from that display, there is an account of what was done to Emmett. Here's what it said, word for word.

Pistol whipped. Kicked. Teeth knocked out. Eye gouged. Knife cut ear off. Axe separated the nose. Front of face severed. Shot with .45 caliber handgun at least three times. Strangulation with barbed wire around his neck. Fan tied to neck and thrown in the river.

Later on in the museum, there is a note indicating that one of Emmett's eyes was dangling from the socket while the other was gouged out.

This was not a simple killing. It was not dispassionate or impersonal. Just the amount of implements use to hurt this kid is shocking: feet, knife, axe, gun, barbed wire. How many other things? How much hate did these two men pour into killing a child? A child who was a complete stranger to the place where he'd been taken who didn't do anything to deserve anything really. I can't imagine doing something like this to another human being no matter what they might have done to me, let alone a 14 year old boy who might have offended someone's wife with words and a whistle and maybe a touch. Maybe.

The Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center, the former cotton gin owned by J.W. Milam. Glendora, MS.

Bryant and Milam were never convicted of killing Emmett Till. They were tried for kidnapping and murder in the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, MS in September of 1955. The trial lasted five days and deliberation by the all-white, all-male jury took all of 67 minutes. The verdict was of course not guilty, even though Bryant and Milam had admitted to taking Emmett from his great-uncle's house (they claimed they scared him and dropped him off at the Grocery and don't know what happened to him after that). 

I realize devoting a paragraph to a trial as important and complicated as the abduction and grisly murder of Emmett Till is skimming over the details. It's not my intent here to be comprehensive as it relates to the specifics of the trial, but suffice it to say that Bryant and Milam literally got away with murder. I know this because the next year the two men gave an interview to Look magazine where (and thinking they could not be tried twice for the same crime) they admitted to the killing.

I am sure that in 1955 Mississippi, the killing of Emmett Till was not a singular occurrence, either in its outcome or the nothing nature of the perceived offense that gave people an excuse to kill a black man (or in this case, child). I am equally convinced that this killing could have been forgotten as easily as any other lynching (because that's what it was; it was an unjustified killing to preserve the white power structure in place in the South). But Emmett's mother, Mamie, wasn't going to let that happen.

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner, MS. The sign was installed in 2007.

The aftermath of most lynchings of black people after the Civil War pretty much went the same way: no real justice was delivered and the friends and relatives of the murdered man, woman or child (or any witnesses to anything for that matter) were scared into silence by overt threats or the tacit understanding that if they said anything, they would be the next victim. Emmett's great-uncle Mose Wright was the first black man in Mississippi to ever identity a white man as the perpetrator of a crime in a court of law; he moved out of the state after doing that or he likely would have been next.

And by "no real justice was delivered" I mean that the murderers were rarely even charged, let alone tried or found guilty and that any evidence of the crime was promptly literally or figuratively buried. Indeed, in the case of Emmett Till, the county sheriff tried to do just that. He ordered the burial of Emmett's body pretty much as soon as it was found. But Mamie Till stopped him. She demanded his body be brought to Chicago for services and burial. Despite the condition of her son's body, she decided to have the services with an open casket and invited the press to document what two strangers who decided to kill Emmett out of pure hatred had done. I can't imagine how painful losing her son, seeing how badly mutilated his body was and then deciding to let the world bear witness was for Mamie Till.

I said in my opening blog post about this trip that one of the most frustrating things about visiting Civil Rights sites in the South is that there is never any real victory or feel good moment about any of these events. If there's anything achieved, it's a small step forward towards something that might stick or may be erased sometime in the near future. In the case of Emmett Till's murder, there was no justice but the step forward is that some people (maybe not white people in Mississippi) who didn't understand what was happening to black people in the South might understand a bit more about what was going on. That's it. That's the feel good stuff. It doesn't feel all that good considering what happened to Emmett.

Chasing down some sites related to Emmett Till's murder and the resulting trial of Bryant and Milam is like taking a step backwards in time. We spent hours driving around the Mississippi countryside seeing absolutely nothing except flat Mississippi River delta farmland punctuated by occasional stands of trees and swampy bayous. We criss-crossed the freight rail tracks I don't know how many times without seeing a single train. The most evidence we saw of any human habitation were the two prisons we drove past (including the notorious Parchman Farm), a stark reminder that Mississippi locks up people at a greater rate than pretty much any other state in our nation (Mississippi is third as of this writing, behind Oklahoma and Louisiana).

Two scenes from the Mississippi landscape we drove through earlier this month.

I am sure it was mostly my imagination and the subject matter of our quest that day but it was honestly creepy. The vibe was not good. We felt like outsiders taking pictures of things that some residents of the state of Mississippi would rather have forgotten by the world. The high percentage of cars with tinted windows in the state didn't make it any better. Our imaginations ran a little wild based on who we could not see in cars following us or driving past us. Was it someone there to do us harm? Imagination, I'm sure, but the car that drove up as we exited E.T.H.I.C. that nobody got out of until we left was a bit unnerving. At least it didn't follow us.

Our agenda had us stopping at three sites that day: Bryant's Grocery, the excellent but quite remote E.T.H.I.C. which preserves Emmett Till's story; and the Tallahatchie County Courthouse in Sumner. Bryant's Grocery is now almost completely collapsed and consumed by the trees and vines now growing over almost every remaining standing surface; it is shown in the cover photograph of this post. It's a stop that's going to take as long as you need to contemplate the chain of events that started there. 

Walking through E.T.H.I.C. is the only real chance we got to spend any significant time in one place on this day. Being inside that building that used to belong to J.W. Milam is chilling. The creaking of the building with any gust of wind and the fact that there was nobody else in the museum and that the motion sensors kept killing the lights on us when we stood still for about 30 seconds didn't help the atmosphere. Maybe it was an effect of the pandemic but it seemed to me that the number of visitors stopping here was extremely low. 

But the place that shocked me the most was the town of Sumner which we drove through to see the courthouse where Bryant and Milam were tried. The town is ridiculously small. There is literally almost nothing there. It seems difficult to believe any sort of business or commerce gets done in this town at all. If you were looking the wrong way when you drove through it you might miss it entirely.

Except for the massive, perfectly maintained, Richardson Romanesque courthouse planted right in the center of town, that is. If Sumner is ridiculously small, then the Tallahatchie County Courthouse is ridiculously big. It feels completely out of place. It feels like someone was determined to let everyone know how important the law is in Tallahatchie County by constructing the biggest, most expensive and intimidating building they could possibly imagine. If that was their intent (and I'm just supposing here, right?) then it worked.

Everything else I needed to know about this courthouse is what's on the lawn and incorporated into the landscaping in front of the building. To the right of the building is a sign titled "Emmett Till Murder Trial". It was placed there in 2007. To the left of the building is a monument to the Confederate soldiers who fought to preserve slavery in the South during the American Civil War. It was placed there almost a century earlier. Priorities, right?

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse, with its white monument to those who fought to preserve slavery.

Sumner, MS. This is the street right in front of the Tallahatchie County Courthouse. 

The day we spent chasing the torture and murder of Emmett Till was the worst day of our trip. It took us into some places that seemed hopeless, with a dark, dark past. I would have preferred to blog about this day as the last Civil Rights post of this trip but it's the earliest of the four events I'm going to write about and the Civil Rights Movement makes more sense generally speaking in chronological order. So it's first.

There is very little comfort in anything we encountered during this day. Sure, the decision by Mamie Till to allow the world to see what two cruel, racist murderers did to a child who did nothing to harm anyone raised the nation's consciousness regarding lynchings that were ongoing in a country that continually boasted about its citizens being more free than any other country on Earth. The ability and speed of the press to broadcast events that ordinarily would have been regional news also helped tremendously, as it would throughout the Civil Rights Movement. This crime is not something I really wanted to know more about but it was important that we did this I think, particularly in 2021 when we are still dealing very much with the same issues as we were in 1955.

---

How We Did It

We visited three sites on our search for Emmett Till's story. We did them north to south which was in reverse chronological order because it worked well with other spots we had on our itinerary for that day. The sites are described below in the opposite order we visited them in.

The Bryant Grocery and Meat Market is almost long gone at this point. There are parts of the exterior standing but only barely and the structure is almost completely overrun with vegetation. There's a sign describing what happened here but not much else. Type "Emmett Till Historical Marker" into Google Maps and you'll find the location where Bryant's used to be.

The Emmett Till Historic Intrepid Center (or E.T.H.I.C.) is about 20 miles north and west of the former Bryant's location in the town of Glendora. The museum is for sure worth a visit, despite how painful the subject matter is. It doesn't seem like much at first but the displays really are well done. As of this writing, admission is just $5. They are open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. but will open on weekdays after 2 p.m. with a call in advance. 

The Tallahatchie County Courthouse is about 12 miles further north from E.T.H.I.C. in Sumner. Note there are two county courthouses in Tallahatchie County: one in Sumner and one in Charleston. Make sure you go to the correct one.

There is museum in Sumner called the Emmett Till Interpretive Center. As of this writing, they are open by appointment only and offer tours both of their museum and the adjacent Tallahatchie County Courthouse. During our trip planning they were closed so we did not visit, although we did see their storefront across the street from the Courthouse. We thought it was possible to enter the Courthouse but deliberately avoided this. The last thing I wanted to see was a room where two men got away with murder.

---