The Blood of Emmett Till(70)

That was a sentiment more or less shared by many African Americans in Chicago. The Packinghouse Workers endorsed Mayor Daley’s appeal to Eisenhower but pointed out that “Emmett Till was hardly less safe in Greenwood, Mississippi than he would have been in Trumbull Park, Chicago,” where racial clashes over housing continued.45 If some in the North, Daley first among them, could be accused of protesting white supremacy in the South and protecting it in the North, many in Chicago were coming to understand full well that the battles fought in the North and in the South were all part of the same war. “We have our own Mississippi only 20 minutes away from here,” declared Abner Willoughby, one of the main organizers of protests at Trumbull Park.46

If the protest politics around the Till case brought neither justice nor clarity, they brought together many elements that would soon anchor the civil rights movement. What happened to Emmett Till in Mississippi had helped galvanize what was now a national movement. Whatever their other differences, the Till case joined activists north and south in a common struggle, giving those in Chicago, Detroit, New York, and other Northern cities a stake in the racial politics of a distant region. It united and pulled into the movement black labor unions and integrated unions like the UPWA that were rapidly becoming “civil rights unions,” whether or not all of the white members agreed with integration. The fragmented American left made common cause in the Till case. Many religious organizations became players in the effort to support the movement. The bitter realities of Emmett Till’s lynching and the acquittals gave civil rights a new moral appeal that it bears to this day. The NAACP’s labor director Herbert Hill mused years later that even if the Till case had only helped form “a Northern consensus about Southern racism,” that consensus was invaluable to the growing civil rights movement in Dixie and across the country.47





18


KILLING EMMETT TILL


If the past is irrevocably gone, and we cannot somehow conjure it back and see it with the omniscient eyes of God, we can nevertheless follow wherever the fragments of evidence lead us and try to understand what they tell us. What we know happened to Emmett Till is cause aplenty for sorrow and anguish; the mysteries that persist mean little or nothing for the insistent dilemmas of race in America. Exactly what happened between Carolyn Bryant and Emmett Till at the store will never be revealed to a certainty, probably not even to her. What she did or didn’t do with respect to his kidnapping may never be entirely clear. But how Mamie Bradley dug deep within herself and inspired thousands of other Americans to move is clear enough. From this tragedy large, diverse numbers of people organized a movement that grew to transform a nation, not sufficiently but certainly meaningfully. What matters most is what we have done and will do with what we do know. We must look at the facts squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history. The bloody and unjust arc of our history will not bend upward if we merely pretend that history did not happen here. We cannot transcend our past without confronting it. As Du Bois wrote in 1912, “This country has had its appetite for facts on the Negro question spoiled by sweets.”1

So, the facts: Emmett Till’s executioners’ ghastly errand began at an undisclosed location that could have been as far away as J. W. Milam’s store in Glendora, thirty miles distant. J.W., Roy Bryant, their brother-in-law Melvin Campbell, and a friend, probably Hubert Clark, were playing cards and drinking hard when the subject of what J.W. called the “smart talk” and whistling incident between Carolyn and “the Chicago boy” came up. Two black men who worked for J.W., Henry Lee Loggins and Levi “Too Tight” Collins, were likely present, though not part of the card game. The white men agreed that this affront at Bryant’s Grocery could not go unavenged. They decided to go get the boy. According to some accounts, J.W. borrowed Clark’s old car because his brand-new two-toned Chevrolet pickup would be too recognizable.2 It is possible that Carolyn went to the Wright house with them and identified Emmett before they kidnapped him, so they may have stopped at Bryant’s Grocery to pick up Carolyn on the way. Or she may have remained at the store and either identified him there or refused to do so when they came back with Emmett. Although her accounts of this night have been inconsistent over the years, she has always maintained that she told her husband the boy they brought to the store for her to identify was not Emmett Till. Whether or not she actually identified the boy is merely a matter of speculation; I have found no way to prove or disprove it. The preponderance of evidence does tell us that almost from the moment of the incident between her and Emmett at the store on August 24, she was frightened of its escalating consequences and probably sought to avoid them.

After they kidnapped Emmett, and whatever may have happened at Bryant’s Grocery that night, the white men hauled the black teenager with them to the place where they had been drinking. Present were J.W., Roy, Campbell, and Clark or perhaps Elmer Kimbell. Some combination of black men who worked for J.W.—possibly Loggins, Collins, Otha “Oso” Johnson, and Joe Willie Hubbard, perhaps only one or two of them—rode in the back of the truck with Emmett. Back at their clandestine watering hole, the white men beat and berated Emmett for as much as an hour. He was neither dead nor unconscious when they decided to take the boy to a hundred-foot bluff overlooking the Mississippi River near Rosedale, a place J.W. knew about, perhaps to scare him, though it is just as likely they intended to kill him there and dump him in the river. The men piled into J.W.’s truck for the hour-long drive to Rosedale. The four white men rode in the large cab. One or more of the black men stayed in the bed of the truck to keep Emmett from fleeing.