The Blood of Emmett Till

“Without justifying the murder, a number of Southern newspapers argued that the boy was at least partially at fault. The most influential account of the lynching, Huie’s 1956 presumptive tell-all, depicted a black boy who virtually committed suicide with his arrogant responses to his assailants.” 

Southern whites were inclined to justify rather than condemn violence against blacks. They could not overly argue that blacks should be harmed, but they could imply that harm was deserved if the cultural mores governing black behavior toward whites were ignored. Blacks were expected to behave in a deferential manner. If they did not, and if violent punishment resulted, then blacks were to blame.

“That part’s not true.”

With this very simple statement, Carolyn Bryant, the woman supposedly assaulted by Emmett Till, admits that she lied in court when she claimed he put his hands on her. This admission is important because Till’s killers used her false testimony to justify what they did. While Bryant was not allowed to speak directly to the jury, word of her testimony no doubt reached them, and one defense attorney alluded to it in his summation, thereby giving an already biased jury all they needed to acquit Till’s killers.

“‘I did not understand the restrictive soreness imposed by segregation,’ wrote a summertime visitor from Mississippi, ‘until I got off that train and breathed the freer air of Chicago.’” 

Blacks in the South lived under a harsh, restrictive regime of white monitoring of their behavior. They were not allowed to step out of line. Chicago, where many blacks moved during the Great Migration for better work opportunities and a freer life, was less restrictive (though far from ideal). Much in the same way that the visitor from Mississippi couldn’t fully understand the restrictions placed upon their life in the South until going North, Till could not understand that things in Mississippi were very different than they were in Chicago.

“It won’t be long now and Negroes and whites intermarrying will be a common thing and the white race will go downhill.” 

A common theme of racist discourse is miscegenation, or marriage between individuals of different races. A presupposition of such rhetoric is that the white race is somehow superior and that interracial marriage and mixed-race children from such marriages would negatively impact all white people. The baseless logic of this argument is readily apparent; however, a society built on racist precepts did not need logic to make a claim that people would support.

“The things that influenced my conduct as a negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear about them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness. Indeed, the white brutality that I had not seen was a more effective control of my behavior than that which I knew.” 

This quotation from black novelist Richard Wright explains how white supremacy operated in the South to maintain control over blacks. Whites engaged in acts of brutality like lynching, and when word of their actions spread, it inspired fear in all blacks. This fear resulted in self-imposed constraints on behavior. This is essentially the antithesis of living in a supposedly democratic society.

“As I grew older, I learned that it was not okay to have black friends.” 

Carolyn Bryant grew up in a racist culture, so it is not surprising that she was willing to lie to get a young black boy in trouble after he broke the social taboo that forbade physical contact between black men and white women. Early in life she learned that, despite the fact that she played easily with the black son of the family’s servant, she was not supposed to befriend him. This anecdote exemplifies the idea that racism is learned and not innate. Moreover, it shows how Bryant’s lie was merely one small act in a society entrenched in bigotry.

“He comes from a big mean over-bearing family. Got a chip on his shoulder. That’s how he got that battlefield promotion; he likes to kill folks. But, hell, we’ve got to have our Milams to fight our wars and to keep the niggahs in line.” 

Milam committed a horrible act of violence against a boy less than half his age. However, when Milam’s defense attorney describes him with honest words, but he presents Milam’s aggression not as a flaw but as a virtue in the fight to uphold white superiority. That the attorney can lean on Milam’s military background and the South’s general racism to defend Till’s murder is startling. The most disheartening part of the statement is the note of acceptance, the sense that things must be this way and such violence is necessary to maintain social order.

“Let the people see what they did to my boy.” 

Mamie Till recognized her son even though his head was beaten so severely that part of it was caved in and his eyes were no longer in their sockets. She immediately decided to show how her son suffered, so that a lesson could be learned from his murder and an accusation made against his killers.

“Just so long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are going to stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna school with my kids. And when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’.” 

J. W. Milam is typical of racist white Southerners of the time who felt that their right to rule over blacks was uncontestable. It simply went without need for justification that blacks were subordinate to whites. If violence was needed to remind blacks of this supposed social hierarchy, then so be it.

“The white men carried out their brutal errand in an atmosphere created by the Citizens’ Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the mass of white public opinion, all of which demanded that African Americans remain the subservient mudsill of Mississippi.” 

Individual racists perpetrated the lynching of Emmett Till, but responsibility lay with many people who helped maintain the atmosphere of hatred against blacks in the South. The murderers may have been poor, violent whites, but the Citizens’ Councils that actively opposed black aspirations for equality were “genteel,” comprised of prominent bankers, businessmen, and newspapermen. They sustained white opinion in a posture of antagonism toward blacks, and that led to the lynching of Emmett Till nearly as much as any loss of temper on the part of the actual killers.

“Judge Brady was already a fuming Dixiecrat [a Southern Democrat who opposed racial integration], calling for a new party ‘into whose ranks all true conservative Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, will be welcomed’ to battle ‘the radical elements of this country who call themselves liberals.’ Senator James Eastland of Mississippi termed the Dixiecrat revolt ‘the opening phase of a fight’ for conservative principles and white supremacy, and ‘a movement that will never die.’” 

Judge Thomas Brady’s “Black Monday” was a response to the Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision that was handed down the year before Emmett Till was lynched. Brady’s words helped foster a climate of hatred toward blacks who aspired for integration and equality. These liberal ideals fell athwart the traditional Southern conservative sense that the old world should be preserved, along with all of its exclusions and inequalities. Some even went so far as to see the outcry over Till’s murder as a communist conspiracy, an attempt by statist socialists to find an excuse to use the federal government to intervene in the South. In the 1960s civil rights legislation finally put an end to legal segregation in housing, employment, and education.

“Some of these men are bankers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, newspaper editors, and publishers; a few are preachers; some are powerful industrialists. It is a quiet, well-bred mob.” 

The Citizens’ Councils that formed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown decision, which integrated schools in the South, worked primarily through legal and legitimate means such as newspaper editorials, lectures, meetings, and pamphlets. They condemned violence, but their racist propaganda created an atmosphere that licensed violence, and they used economic pressure and boycotts to dissuade blacks from laying claim to their right to vote. They also supplied money for the defense of those who committed violence against blacks, such as the murderer of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.

“In the wake of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, for example, one Delta legislator declared that ‘a few killings would be the best thing for the state.’ A few judicious murders now, he suggested, ‘would save a lot of bloodshed later on.’”

The South in the 1950s sometimes seems like an entirely different country from present-day America. No politician today would stand up in public and say that it might be necessary to kill a few people of color so that fewer of them will need to be killed in the future. Yet many leading officials in Mississippi espoused exactly such sentiments.

“Despite the openly political nature of the Mississippi attacks, the national news media soft-pedaled the murders of George Lee and Lamar Smith and said little about the attempted murder of Gus Courts. […] Courts never returned to Belzoni. ‘You see before you an American refugee from Mississippi terror,’ he testified two years later before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. ‘We had to flee in the night. We are the American refugees from the terror in the South, all because we wanted to vote.’” 

The US Supreme Court could order Southern schools to integrate and to allow blacks to vote, but it was another thing altogether to actually realize these goals on the ground in a state like Mississippi. Whites responded to attempts by blacks to pay the poll tax and register to vote with violence. Leaders who worked to sign up voters were murdered. Those who survived attempts at murder, like Gus Courts, had to flee the South.

“On September 1, the day after his body was found, the Clarksdale Press register called it ‘a savage and useless crime’ and stated flatly, ‘If conviction with the maximum penalty of the law cannot be secured in this heinous crime, then Mississippi may as well burn all its law books and close its courts.” 

Not all Mississippians were racist, and not all believe that violence was a legitimate tool for keeping blacks in their place. Some brave public leaders and publications spoke out and condemned the murder of Emmett Till. But they were, it seems, outnumbered by those who ignored facts and fabricated stories like the one Sheriff Strider proposed: that Till’s murder was an NAACP plot to raise money to promote integration.

“In their exchanges with local whites, the women learned much. Pittman overheard two excused jurors acknowledge to one another that they had purposely given answers sure to get them off the jury because they knew that ‘the defendants had killed the boy, and they did not want to be party to the verdict of “not guilty,” which they knew would be expected.’” 

The white community directly involved with Till’s trial knew it was a foregone conclusion that no white jury would convict white men for killing of a black person, even a black child. When the same women who overheard the jurors then speak to other people in the town where the trial was held, they discovered almost universal hostility toward the prosecution as well as a sense that the crime was justified. Some even said that any juror voting to convict would likely face violence afterward. It seemed that unwritten social laws negated legitimate laws in Mississippi at the time of Till’s trial.

“All five of the defense lawyers later acknowledged to an interviewer that the state had presented ‘sufficient evidence to convict’ Milam and Bryant. The defense now needed to offer jurors committed to acquittal some plausible pretext for their votes.”

We again see sham justice at work. All the jurors knew how they were going to rule; they just needed a reason to do so. The prosecution offered eyewitness evidence that Milam and Bryant took Emmett from the home of Moses Wright and that Milam was later seen at the barn where Emmett was beaten. Normally, this evidence would be enough to convict the accused. But because the jury would not do so, the defense lawyers came up with ingenious and mutually contradictory arguments that nevertheless provided an excuse for a vote for acquittal. The lawyers argued that Till was not really murdered because the body was not his. At the same time, they argued that he deserved to be killed for having transgressed against the customary separation of the races. The fact that these contradicting arguments could convince a jury that Milam and Bryant weren’t guilty goes far in offering a view of socioracial realties in Mississippi at the time.

“‘For his numerous moments of brilliant oratory, he brought tears to the eyes not only of those seated at the colored press tables but to some of the white listeners as well.’ Pounding the table occasionally, Chatham asserted that he was not moved by ‘the pressure and agitation of organizations outside or inside the state of Mississippi.’ In other words, he didn’t like the NAACP any more than the jury did. Instead, he told them, ‘I am concerned with what is morally right. To be concerned with anything else will be dangerous to the precepts and traditions of the South.’” 

At the trial’s end, the prosecution and the defense delivered summations, or final pleas to the jury. They battled verbally over how the South should be conceived and what version of it should prevail in the minds of the jurors. The prosecution painted a picture of a moral South, where the murder of a child by adults should not be permitted for any reason. The defense relied more on an emotional sense of white traditions and privileges that must be preserved.

“His lynching, his mother’s decision to open the casket to the world, and the trial of Milam and Bryant spun the country, and arguably the world, in a different direction.” 

Emmett Till’s killers did not intend his murder to be kept a secret, but news of the murder spread farther than they anticipated or hoped. Violence against blacks was expected in their world, and they knew that news of the beating and killing would become common knowledge, a source for jokes and winks between fellow racists, a way of bonding. But the international media got hold of the story because of Mamie Till’s brave decision to leave her son’s casket open and the scandal that her decision caused. In the eyes of the world, America, the bastion of democracy, suddenly looked less like the heroic defender of people’s rights and more like a racist bully. The sense of horror the murder provoked also incited a backlash against such violence and inspired a movement to bring it to an end. People increasingly began to speak out against the “folkways” of the South and to insist that they change.

“We were never able to scare him.” 

When J. W. Milam confessed to the murder of Emmett Till in a Look magazine story a few years later, he provided more details of the killing. One of the most striking details was Till’s attitude toward his killers. In Milam’s telling, Till comes across as courageous in the face of adversity. It’s further interesting to note that Milam admits to the crime knowing that, due to double jeopardy, he cannot be retried for the murder.

“We cannot transcend our past without confronting it.” 

With these words the author sums up what he has tried to accomplish in this book. Tyson wants America to confront a horrifying and painful part of its history so that people everywhere might learn from it and begin to transcend the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors that lead to racist violence.

“Roy told a friend in 1985 who was wearing a hidden recording device, ‘and I had backed out on killing the motherfucker.’ In the end, Roy told his friend, they decided that ‘carryin[g] him to the hospital wouldn’t have done him no good’ and instead they would ‘put his ass in the Tallahatchie River.’ The proposal to take Emmett to the hospital, Carolyn told me, violated the sensibilities of Melvin Campbell, who muttered a curse and fired a .45-caliber bullet into Emmett’s brain. This may have been only a final malignant gesture, given the boy’s injuries. But certainly the gunshot brought an emphatic end to the grisly proceedings.” 

It is in this final chapter of the book that Tyson finally provides the graphic details of Emmett Till’s killing. Roy Bryant is no hero in this story, but he demonstrates a moment of human compassion when he suggests that Emmett, despite having his skull crushed, should be taken to a hospital. The others disagree and shoot Emmett. What apparently began as a drunken attempt to teach a disobedient black boy a lesson turns into a murder.

“In ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ Martin Luther King Jr. writes that his worst enemies are not the members of the Citizens’ Councils or the Ku Klux Klan but the ‘white moderate’ who claims to support the goals of the [civil rights] movement but deplores its methods of protest and deprecates its timetable for change: ‘We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.’”

The author believes that the murder of Emmett Till continues today in a metaphorical sense. It is evident in the way some police kill young black men for minor infractions of the law or for no infractions at all; they take advantage of their power to commit acts of racist violence. According to the author, we are all to blame for this violence. We do not speak out loudly enough or often enough, and this allows the legacy of racism to endure.