The Blood of Emmett Till(26)

In Mississippi a few days later the front page of the Greenwood Morning Star reported that Reverend J. A. Perkins from Tupelo had declared at the National Baptist Convention in Chicago that the butchery of Emmett Till “did something to everybody.” Before this tragedy opinion among African Americans about the path to full citizenship had been divided, he acknowledged. There would still be differences of opinion, but Till’s slaying spurred and unified the fight against segregation. “We are not going to be afraid of anyone,” Perkins vowed. “We are going to battle for what is right—as human beings—and we are going to stand against this wrong.”27

David Jackson and Ernest Withers, photographers for Jet and Ebony, snapped pictures of Emmett’s body at the funeral home, Withers a close-up and Jackson a full-body shot.28 Several other magazines and newspapers printed photographs, but Withers’s close-up of Emmett’s face, published in Jet on September 15, four days before Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam went on trial for the killing, was passed around at barbershops, beauty parlors, college campuses, and black churches, reaching millions of people. Perhaps no photograph in history can lay claim to a comparable impact in black America.29 “I think the picture in Jet magazine showing Emmett Till’s mutilation was probably the greatest media product in the last forty or fifty years,” Representative Charles Diggs said in 1987.30

Television coverage of the case had an even greater impact. Few in the summer and fall of 1955 could fathom the immense power of television. Even many sophisticated journalists and seasoned politicians did not yet understand that there was a new mass language that came of age with the Emmett Till generation. This was television’s first real “media circus,” and it made clear that civil rights stories would not be confined to a minority of Americans or a particular region. “The television cameras showed what the body looked like and showed the big crowds,” recalled the journalist Harry Marsh. “All the networks that were operating at that time took film from the Chicago stations.” It was television, Marsh continued, that “ignited the national interest in the story and that fed into the major coverage of the trial.”31

The sociologist Adam Green observes that the spectacle surrounding Emmett Till’s death “convened” black Chicago and black Mississippi into one congregation that trumpeted the tragedy to the world. These voices of mourning and protest emerged exactly as Mamie hoped they would. Members of this black national congregation launched rallies, letter campaigns, and fund drives that transformed another Southern horror story into a call for action. In this call and response, Green writes, “northern city and southern delta seemed the same place, and the need for collective action among African Americans across the nation seemed urgent as never before.”32





9


WARRING REGIMENTS OF MISSISSIPPI


In many ways Emmett Till was a casualty of the anger produced by the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, handed down on May 17, 1954, first dubbed “Black Monday” by Representative John Bell Williams of Mississippi. Mississippi Circuit Court judge Thomas Brady speculated that the mandate to integrate public schools would compel right-minded white men to commit violence against foolhardy black boys. Killing would be necessary, even unavoidable. “If trouble is to come,” Brady warned in his incendiary manifesto, Black Monday, “we can predict how it will start.” The detonator would be the “supercilious, glib young Negro, who sojourned in Chicago or New York, and who considers the counsel of his elders archaic.” That black child “will perform an obscene act, or make an obscene remark, or a vile overture or assault upon some white girl.” This violation of segregation’s most sacred taboo would set off a deluge of white violence against black boys. The foolish doctrine of equality between the races, cautioned Brady, was “the reasoning which produces riots, raping and revolutions.”1

Brady’s words are an almost eerie prediction of the murder of Emmett Till, but at the time there was nothing notable about his menacing fantasy of a race war. Such threats of violence were nothing new to black Mississippians or, for that matter, to any student of Reconstruction or the age of Jim Crow. But a new front in the war over Mississippi had opened after 1945, when African American soldiers returned from Europe and the Pacific. Into these renewed hostilities the Supreme Court dropped its Brown v. Board of Education bombshell. Milam and Bryant were not on a political mission when they pounded on Moses Wright’s door, and they did not kidnap Emmett Till beneath the banner of states’ rights, racial integrity, or white supremacy. 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—or die. But the battles ignited by Brown had been brewing for a long time.

According to William Bradford Huie, Milam later justified Till’s lynching using the terms of violent racial and sexual politics:

Just as 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 go to school with my kids. And when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we’ve got some rights. . . . “Chicago boy,” I said, “I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. God damn you, I’m going to make an example of you just so everybody can see how my folks stand.”2