The Blood of Emmett Till(5)
One stock theme in stories of Emmett Till is that, being from the North, he died in Mississippi because he just didn’t know any better. How was a boy from Chicago supposed to know anything about segregation or the battle lines laid down by white supremacy? It is tempting to paint him, as his mother did, as innocent of the perilous boundaries of race; her reasons for doing so made sense at the time, even though being fourteen and abducted at gunpoint by adults would seem evidence enough of his innocence. But it defies the imagination that a fourteen-year-old from 1950s Chicago could really be ignorant of the consequences of the color of his skin.
Race worked in different ways in Chicago than it did in Mississippi, but there were similarities. After Emmett was murdered one newspaper writer, Carl Hirsch, had the clarity of mind to note, “The Negro children who live here on Chicago’s South Side or any Northern ghetto are no strangers to the Jim Crow and the racist violence. . . . Twenty minutes from the Till home is Trumbull Park Homes, where for two years a racist mob has besieged 29 Negro families in a government housing project.” Emmett attended a segregated, all-black school in a community “padlocked as a ghetto by white supremacy.” Hirsch pointed out, “People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.”4
There was at least one way that Chicago was actually more segregated than Mississippi. A demographic map of the city in 1950 shows twenty-one distinct ethnic neighborhoods: German, Irish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Czech and Slovak, Scottish, Polish, Chinese, Greek, Yugoslavian, Russian, Mexican, French, and Hungarian, among others.5 These ethnic groups divided Chicago according to an unwritten treaty, which clearly stated that Germans, for instance, would live on the North Side, Irish on the South Side, Jews on the West Side, Bohemians and Poles on the Near Southwest Side and Near Northwest Side, and African Americans in the South Side’s “Black Belt.” All of these groups had gangs that regarded their neighborhood as a place to be defended against encroachments by outsiders. And the most visible outsiders were African Americans.
Black youngsters who walked through neighborhoods other than their own did so at their peril. Those searching for places to play, in parks and other public facilities, were especially vulnerable. These were lessons that black children growing up on the South Side learned with their ABCs.6
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Like many of his contemporaries, Emmett loved baseball. “He was a nice guy,” said thirteen-year-old Leroy Abbott, a teammate on the Junior Rockets, their neighborhood baseball team. “And a good pitcher—a lot of stuff on the ball.”7 With the White Sox and the Cubs both in Chicago, it may seem odd that Emmett rooted for the Brooklyn Dodgers, but for a young black baseball enthusiast they were hard to resist. Brooklyn had not only broken the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson in 1947 but had also signed the catcher Roy Campanella the next year and in 1949 acquired Don Newcombe, Emmett’s hero. Newcombe soon became the first black pitcher to start a World Series game and the first to win twenty games in a season.8
One night when Emmett was about twelve, Mamie sent him to the store to buy a loaf of bread. He was ordinarily reliable about such things, but on the way home he saw some boys playing baseball in the park. He walked over to the backstop and talked his way into the game. He planned to stay for a short time and then go home with the bread; his mother might not even notice, he told himself. But his passion for the game overcame him; he must have become absorbed in the smell of the grass and the crack of the bat, the solid slap of the ball into leather and the powdery dust of the base paths. “So, I guess he just put down the bread and got in that game,” his mother recalled. “And that’s exactly where I found Bo—Bo and that loaf of bread. Of course, by that time, the bread kind of looked like the kids had been using it for second base.”9
Emmett was a lovable, playful, and somewhat mischievous child but essentially well-behaved. He spent his early years in Argo, less than an hour’s train ride from his eventual home in Chicago, and was unusually close to his mother and other family members. But he grew up in one of the toughest and most segregated cities in America, knowing as virtually every African American in Chicago knew that in Trumbull Park black fathers kept loaded firearms in their home for good reason. Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs.
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The City of New Orleans was the southbound train of the Illinois Central Railway that would carry Emmett to Mississippi in August 1955. The Illinois Central connected Chicago to Mississippi not merely by its daily arrivals and departures but also by tragedy, hope, and the steel rails of history. Over the six decades from 1910 to 1970 some six million black Southerners departed Dixie for promised lands all over America. Chicago, the poet Carl Sandburg wrote, became a “receiving station and port of refuge” for more than half a million of them, vast numbers of whom hailed from Mississippi. “The world of Mississippi and the world of Chicago were intertwined and interdependent,” writes the historian Isabel Wilkerson, “and what happened in one did not easily escape notice of the other from afar.” Straight up the line of the northbound Illinois Central the carloads of pilgrims from the Delta would rumble, the floors littered with so many empty pasteboard boxes that had been lovingly packed with food from back home that people called it “the chicken bone express.” These migrants brought with them musical, culinary, religious, and community traditions that became a part of Chicago; in fact, the narrow isthmus on the South Side where African Americans were confined was often referred to as “North Mississippi.”10 What they found there, however, was not the Promised Land. Though Chicago offered a welcome breath of free air, the newcomers also faced a relentless battle with the white working class over neighborhood borders and public space.