The Blood of Emmett Till(73)

—ROY BRYANT, quoted in Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson, Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America

The struggle of humanity against power is always the struggle of memory against forgetting.

—MILAN KUNDERA, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“I am sure you read of the lynch-murder of young Emmett Till of Chicago,” Rosa Parks wrote to a friend soon after these notorious events. “This case could be multiplied many times in the South, not only Miss., but Ala, Georgia, Fla.”1 A month after the acquittals Parks joined an overflow crowd at Martin Luther King’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery to hear Dr. T. R. M. Howard speak on the Till case. Dr. King introduced the fiery physician from Mound Bayou, who spoke passionately about the assassinations of George Lee and Lamar Smith and told the story of Emmett Till in riveting detail.2 Parks had read about the lynching and wept at the gruesome photograph in Jet, but Howard’s story was a powerful firsthand account. His speech moved her deeply and preoccupied her for days. Only four days later Parks defied the segregation laws on a Montgomery city bus. The driver insisted that she move. Thinking of Emmett Till, she said, Parks refused to do so. Her subsequent arrest provided the occasion for the Montgomery Bus Boycott.3

The impact of the Till lynching resonated across America for years, touching virtually everyone who heard it, but the case had its most profound effect on a generation of African Americans two decades younger than Parks. Folks of all ages discussed the Till case in barbershops, churches, and living rooms north and south. For black youth across the country, however, the Till lynching became a decisive moment in the development of their consciousness around race. “The murder just shocked me,” recalled Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a legendary star in the NBA and later an accomplished author. “I began thinking of myself as a black person for the first time, not just a person.” Muhammad Ali recalled the effect of Till’s death on him: “I realized that this could just as easily have been a story about me or my brother.” Indianapolis’s Richard Hatcher, the first African American elected mayor of a major U.S. city, said the killing made him “very bitter and angry towards white people. That’s how I felt at that particular time.”4 A woman who grew up in Chicago and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and later became a civil rights activist remembered, “The first time I was really confronted with this black-white issue was with Emmett Till. That really slapped me in the face.”5

Joyce Ladner, a Mississippi native who became a renowned activist with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), called herself and the other young blacks who grew up in the 1950s “the Emmett Till generation.”6 Charles McDew, eventually chair of SNCC, said that all the young people in the movement “knew where they were when they saw the pictures of Emmett Till’s body.”7 For Julian Bond, who worked with SNCC and later became chair of the national board of the NAACP, the Till case was one of the key events that “provided stepping stones leading inexorably toward my involvement in the freedom struggle.” He was “moved along the path to later activism by the graphic pictures that appeared in Jet magazine of Emmett Till’s swollen and misshapen body.”8 Fay Bellamy Powell, who later worked with SNCC, was horrified at the coverage of the Till case and yet steeled for the struggles to come: “My spirit allowed me a glimpse of the future, saying, ‘Don’t worry about this. You will have an opportunity to address this madness. You will assist in showing the world the face of this evil.’?”9

With style and daring, “the Emmett Till generation” showed the world a great deal when they launched the sit-ins that swept across the South in the spring of 1960. Four freshmen at North Carolina A&T walked into the Greensboro Woolworth’s department store on Monday, February 1, bought a number of personal items, then sat at the segregated lunch counter and asked to be served. The four remained for almost an hour, until the lunch counter closed. On Tuesday twenty-five men and four women, all students at A&T, occupied the lunch counter. On Wednesday sixty-three students participated, joined in the afternoon by three white students from Greensboro College. On Thursday hundreds more black students became involved. By the end of the week students in other cities and towns in North Carolina—Raleigh, Charlotte, Fayetteville, High Point, Concord, and Elizabeth City—sat in at segregated lunch counters. By the end of the month young people across the South were organizing sit-ins. Within two months the demonstrations had spread to fifty-four cities in nine states; within a year more than a hundred cities witnessed similar protests. A new, mass-based phase of the civil rights movement, a distinctive radicalism rooted in nonviolent direct action, had begun.10 Driving it were young people, many of whom had been inspired to action by the story of a boy their age lynched in Mississippi.

Six decades later a white police officer shot and killed a young black man named Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. The local grand jury’s decision not to prosecute the officer expanded and enraged a national movement born of similar killings, and young protestors throughout the United States chanted, “Say his name! Emmett Till! Say his name! Emmett Till!” His name, invoked alongside a litany of the names of unarmed black men and women who died at the hands of police officers, remained a symbol of the destructiveness of white supremacy. Hundreds of young people thronged the fence in front of the White House, chanting, “How many black kids will you kill? Michael Brown, Emmett Till!” Black Lives Matter—a movement, not just a hashtag—quickly became symbolic shorthand for the struggle. Much like the Emmett Till protests of the 1950s, these demonstrations raged from coast to coast and fueled scores of local campaigns. Police brutality against men and women of color provided the most urgent grievance but represented a range of festering racial problems: the criminalization of black bodies; the militarization of law enforcement; mass incarceration; racial injustice in the judicial system; the chasms of inequality between black and white and rich and poor; racial disparities in virtually every measure of well-being, from employment and education to health care. Such moments could make movements, wrote the political scientist Frederick Harris in the Washington Post, and become “like the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 . . . transformative episodes that remake perceptions and force a society to abandon abhorrent practices.”11