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Emmett came back to Mamie two weeks later in a pine box packed with lime, his face mutilated and swollen beyond recognition, one eye missing and the other hanging halfway down his cheek, his skull split and pierced by a bullet hole. At 2am on the morning of Sunday 28 August, he\u2019d been taken from his great-uncle\u2019s house by two white men, Roy Bryant and JW Milam, who claimed he\u2019d flirted with Bryant\u2019s young wife, Carolyn, as she minded the couple\u2019s general store.\u00a0Bo had gone in to buy bubblegum the previous Wednesday evening; his cousins recalled that he\u2019d whistled when Carolyn came out. They whisked him away from the store, but the white men came for him anyway, bundled him into the back of a pickup truck with a couple of Milam\u2019s black hired hands, drove him around half the night, then tortured him in a barn before shooting and killing him. A black teenager called Willie Reed who happened to pass by heard the terrible screaming; later he saw something wrapped in a tarp loaded onto the truck. Emmett\u2019s bloated body was found in the Tallahatchie River by a fisherman three days later.<\/p>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>The accused: Roy Bryant and JW Milam during their trial in September 1955. The all-white jury acquitted both defendants after deliberating for just over an hour. (Photo by Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n
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Mamie refused to bury her boy in the Delta mud. She made sure that his body was sent back to Chicago, told the undertaker not to clean up his pulped head, and insisted on an open coffin so that the world could see what had been done to her son.<\/p>\n
The funeral service was held on 3 September at Chicago\u2019s Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ. Tens of thousands of people filed past Emmett as he lay in state for four days afterwards, dignified in a dark suit in defiance of the white men\u2019s violence. Some fainted at the sight. The horrifying photograph of his disfigured face was published in Jet<\/em> magazine and reprinted everywhere, passed round, cut out and shown to African-American children for years afterwards as a warning. The image was a deliberate reversal of the white supremacist tradition of lynching photographs \u2013 gruesome images of black men hanging from trees while white families looked on \u2013 printed and sold as postcards in the segregation-era South.<\/p>\n
Mamie Till Bradley insisted on an open coffin so that the world could see what had been done to her son <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
When an all-white Mississippi jury acquitted Milam and Bryant in a brief trial in the town of Sumner, near Money, that September, news of the verdict travelled round the world.\u00a0The dancer Josephine Baker<\/a> led a protest in Paris, and letters demanding justice for Till arrived at the White House from as far away as Norway and the Kremlin. Rallies were held across the American Midwest; in Harlem, Mamie addressed a huge crowd alongside leaders of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (the NAACP), the Abyssinian Baptist Church, and black unions.<\/p>\n
In November, Mississippi civil rights activist TRM Howard spoke about Till at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. The pastor of the church was the 26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr<\/a>, and among the congregation was the seamstress Rosa Park<\/a>s. Four days later she refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white man, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott<\/a>. Many years afterwards she said: \u201cI thought of Emmett Till and I couldn\u2019t go back.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thousands of black men and boys had been lynched on lesser pretexts, their killers never arrested, let alone brought to trial. But it was Emmett Till\u2019s murder that galvanised the burgeoning civil rights movement and broke through white America\u2019s silence about racist killings. Mamie\u2019s courage in displaying her son\u2019s body was essential to its impact; so, too, was the historical and political context of the time at which it happened.<\/p>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Mamie Till Bradley is comforted as her son\u2019s coffin is lowered into its grave in Alsip, Illinois, on 6 September 1955. The funeral followed four days in which Emmett Till\u2019s body lay in state. (Photo by Getty Images)<\/span><\/figcaption><\/div>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n
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Till\u2019s lynching united in grief, solidarity and anger the black communities of Mississippi and Chicago, which had been separated but not severed by the \u2018great migration\u2019 that began around 1915 and, over the next five decades, saw six million African-Americans move from the rural south of the US to the cities of the north-east, west and midwest. In some ways, it began to crystallise a national black consciousness. The hugely popular TV show I Love Lucy<\/em> was interrupted to announce the discovery of Till\u2019s body; the trial was international news, with TV cameramen crowding the square outside Sumner\u2019s courthouse. White liberal reporters from the north saw Southern racism up close for the first time; black Chicago\u2019s confident publications, especially Jet<\/em> magazine, understood and framed the story in the context of the civil rights movement gathering strength in the South, and the white backlash against it.<\/p>\n
The year before Emmett was killed, a unanimous decision by the Supreme Court in the case of Brown vs Board of Education had declared unconstitutional the state laws establishing separate schools for black and white students.\u00a0It was a landmark ruling that opened the first real crack in the legal structures of white supremacy, and set the Federal government on a collision course with Southern racism.\u00a0That victory had given a new impetus to the black freedom movement, but also to white supremacists, who joined White Citizens\u2019 Councils (a sanitised retooling of the Ku Klux Klan<\/a>) in droves to protect their \u2018way of life\u2019. The thought of their daughters sharing classrooms with black teenage boys was anathema to those people. Racist fantasies about black sexuality and horror at the notion of \u2018miscegenation\u2019, or \u2018racial mixing\u2019, were driving forces behind Emmett\u2019s murder, as they were behind so many previous lynchings.<\/p>\n
Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000 African-Americans were lynched in Southern states <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
Between 1877 and 1950, more than 4,000 African-Americans were lynched in Southern states \u2013 that is, whipped, castrated, tortured, burned alive or strung from the trees by white mobs \u2013 a form of terrorism meant to enforce the subjugation of the entire community. Nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced to Congress between 1882 and 1962, but this seemingly obvious measure was blocked every time by Southern Democrats. (In 2005, the Senate finally issued a formal apology for its failure to act.) The NAACP hadmade the passage of anti-lynching legislation a primary goal since 1912; now, with the victory of Brown vs Board and the backlash against it, America\u2019s oldest grassroots civil rights organisation was determined to redouble its efforts.<\/p>\n
A few months before Till\u2019s kidnapping, on 7 May 1955, minister and voting rights activist George Lee was shot dead in Belzoni, Mississippi. Police claimed he had died in a traffic accident, and that the shot found in his mouth was loosened dental fillings. Reverend Lee was given an open-casket funeral; his photographs, in life and in death, appeared on the cover of Jet<\/em>. But the far more shocking images of the cheeky Chicago boy who\u2019d gone South to visit family and been slaughtered for nothing more than teenage high spirits, mourned by a young mother who was also light-skinned enough to please the warped \u2018colorist\u2019 prejudices of the time, gave the NAACP a much better vehicle for its anti-lynching campaign. As Till scholar and film-maker Keith Beauchamp puts it, Till\u2019s murder was \u201cthe perfect storm\u201d. It was through that coincidence of history, politics and brave personalities that Emmett Till became the protomartyr of the civil rights movement, and his mother its grief-stricken but determined Madonna, a model for countless others deprived of their sons and daughters.<\/p>\n
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Emmett Till\u2019s legacy<\/h2>\n
Emmett Till\u2019s story lives on in literature, music, art and film, in commemorations and museums, in activism and the unfinished search for justice. Those streams converge and cross like the rivers of the Mississippi Delta, so that it\u2019s hard to say where one ends and another begins; the waters began to flow at once, and still flow on today. Despite confessions by Milam and Bryant soon after the trial, no one has ever been convicted of Till\u2019s murder. The FBI reopened the case in 2004 after Keith Beauchamp, working closely with Emmett\u2019s mother, discovered new evidence. No one was indicted then but, since Carolyn Bryant confessed that she lied at the trial in an interview with historian Timothy Tyson for his 2017 book The Blood of Emmett Till<\/em>, there\u2019s been pressure to reopen the case again.<\/p>\n
The first blues for Emmett Till was written by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes almost immediately; during the first weeks after Emmett\u2019s murder, the leftwing Daily Worker<\/em> and Chicago Defender<\/em> carried an outpouring of elegies. In 1960, the great Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks published a pair of poems that put Carolyn Bryant and Mamie Till Bradley at the heart of the story. The first is a free-verse exploration of Carolyn\u2019s imagined thoughts, incisively honest and bravely empathic: Brooks\u2019 Carolyn is both complicit and a victim of the men around her. The second gives us Mamie\u2019s unspeakable grief from a respectful distance, in the restrained third person. Together, the poems map the two women\u2019s roles in the system that both holds them and keeps them separate, putting gendered power at the core of white supremacy.<\/p>\n
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