The first episode of Eyes on the Prize contained a fifteen-minute segment about the brutal murder of a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy who had traveled to the small hamlet of Money, Mississippi, to spend part of his summer vacation with relatives. Here I heard the name of Emmett Till for the first time and watched in horror as I encountered his story.
From that moment, Emmett Till became a constant presence in my life. At first, the questions I had left me little peace. Whatever happened to this child’s mother? Was she still living, or had she died somewhere after a lonely, obscure life? Whatever happened to those who killed young Till? Did they go on to prosper? Were they gloating over the fact they had gotten away with murder? Had they come to feel remorse?
I set out immediately to find out, but because this curiosity preceded my discovery of the Internet by about a year, it took me awhile. I found myself looking through every book I could find on twentieth-century black studies, and I was surprised at how infrequently I encountered Emmett Till. I finally learned that at least one book had been written on the case, Stephen Whitfield’s 1988 study, A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. I shortly learned that there was another, more recent contribution. In May 1995, I happened to read in the University of Utah’s Daily Utah Chronicle that a woman named Clenora Hudson-Weems was coming to the campus to speak. The brief notice mentioned that she had authored a book, Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement. Although her lecture was unrelated to the Till case, I still attended, hoping that her book would be available for purchase. It was and I bought it. During her lecture, she briefly mentioned Emmett Till and answered one of my nagging questions by telling the audience that Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, was, in fact, still living. She was even scheduled to speak at an event in Memphis for which Hudson-Weems was the chairperson, “From Money, Mississippi, to Union, South Carolina: The Legacy of American Oppression.” I was thrilled to learn that Mamie Till-Mobley was still speaking out. During the summer of 1995, I read the Whitfield and Hudson-Weems books to some degree of satisfaction, but I could not get the case out of my mind.
Emmett Till took on an unexpected significance for me in the fall of 1996 after I enrolled in a class on American racism. In early November, I began thinking about my final project for the class, due on December 3. I wanted it to make a real impact, and my first inclination was to center it on Emmett Till. I wondered if there was any way that I could contact Mamie Till-Mobley and interview her. I went to the library, grabbed a Chicago telephone directory from off the shelf, and was surprised to find a listing that read, “Mobley, Gene and Mamie Till.” I wrote down both the address and telephone number, and on November 12, I wrote Mrs. Till-Mobley about my project and requested an interview. I gave her my phone number so that she could respond to me quickly.
A few weeks went by, and I never heard back. Because it was getting close to the project’s due date, I decided to call her. I nervously dialed the number, and after a few rings, Gene Mobley answered. I asked him if I could speak to Mrs. Mobley, and he put her on the phone. Her friendly tone immediately put me at ease. I introduced myself, reminded her of the letter I had sent her, explained my class project, and asked for the interview. She agreed, and we arranged a time and date for me to call back. After she canceled once to attend a funeral and didn’t answer on our second prearranged call, I became nervous. I finally reached her on December 3, the very day the project was due. Luckily, my class met at night, so I had most of the day to transcribe the interview.
Mamie Till-Mobley told me she could spare forty-five minutes, but we conversed for over two hours, with her doing most of the talking. After discussing the kidnapping and murder, we talked about her life in the four decades since Emmett’s death. She told me about the Emmett Till Foundation, her years as a schoolteacher, and her current work in training children to recite speeches of the civil rights movement. This call began a friendship that resulted in dozens of telephone conversations over the next six years.
In 1997, I received a telephone call from a budding young filmmaker named Keith Beauchamp. He had seen a brief reference online about some help I was giving Mamie Till-Mobley on a project and asked if I would make an introductory call to her on his behalf, as he wanted to discuss with her a feature film he was hoping to make. I agreed, but for no particular reason, procrastinated in making the call. Soon Keith’s mother called and reminded me of her son’s request, and then Keith followed up with another call of his own. It became obvious that Keith was serious, and so I finally made the call to Mamie Till-Mobley and explained Keith’s interest in talking to her. She told me that she would be happy to speak with him, and I relayed to him that news. After that, I forgot about it.
Nearly two years passed, but on May 1, 1999, Keith sent me an email and reminded me about our earlier conversations. He had not only contacted Mamie Till-Mobley after our earlier exchanges, but he had been working closely with her. She gave a nod of approval not only for his feature film, but she also encouraged him to make a documentary about the Emmett Till story. In time, the latter took precedence, and by late 2002 Keith was showing publicly a rough-cut version of his film, The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till. It was released in theaters in 2005, and in October 2006 it began running on Court TV. By the spring of 2004, the hard work of Keith, victims advocate Alvin Sykes, and others got the attention of the Justice Department, which opened an investigation into the Till murder that lasted eighteen months.
With this unprecedented interest in Emmett Till as my inspiration, I began to think about what my own contributions to this case should be. For some time I had considered writing a book, but rarely gave it serious thought. By the fall of 2004, however, I discovered that there was a book inside of me that needed to get out. Between 1988 and 2004, at least seven books appeared on the case, along with one other documentary, Stanley Nelson’s Emmy-winning film, The Murder of Emmett Till. Since I started my research, several more books have been released. These include memoirs, novels, and studies of media coverage of the trial. As important as these all are, no one had attempted to write a truly comprehensive narrative of the case, with all of the details that are, in many respects, stranger than fiction. Such a book has been crying out to be written, and the one in your hands is my attempt to provide it.
I began doing newspaper research immediately upon deciding to write, and a few months later, in January 2005, I took my first trip to the Mississippi Delta. In the years since, I have returned over a dozen times and taken three trips to Chicago, where I have worked in archives and conducted interviews. Over the course of my research, I have talked in detail to witnesses of incidents related to the kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till, interviewed reporters who covered the trial, and have even sat down with a spectator who attended it. Around the time I began working on this book, I started a website, www.emmetttillmurder.com, which at the time of this writing has received over one million hits from people in 200 countries. As a result of this attention, I have been invited to speak about the Till story in Florida, Indiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New York, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Northern England, and Wales.
I have learned more about the Till case in the last decade of research and writing than I ever thought possible. However, this knowledge has come as a double-edged sword in many respects. More than anything else, my aim has been to tell the story as accurately and thoroughly as I can, and I wanted the depths of my research to be reflected in that. Since the mid-1980s, Mamie Till-Mobley and others who were involved in the case have written or spoken publicly about their experience. As I scoured the earliest newspaper accounts, interviews, and speeches of the principals in this saga, which were provided days, weeks, or just a few months after the events, I have discovered that later reminiscences often conflict with 1955 accounts. Certainly this is to be expected to some degree. If I have learned anything doing this study, it is that memory can be very problematic and is often an unreliable source of histor
y. Memory expert Elizabeth Loftus has demonstrated time and again that “misinformation can influence people’s memories when they are interrogated in a suggestive fashion or when they talk to other people who give their version of the events.”1 Sincerity or insincerity has little to do with false memory. Loftus and Daniel Bernstein have pointed out “two types of lying. Some people lie intentionally and for myriad reasons: financial gain, fame, popularity, even mischief. Other people lie without knowing that they are lying. In other words, they think they are telling the truth but they are reporting something that is false—a belief in a false memory.”2 This is rarely obvious to the person incorrectly recalling his or her past experiences. Where stories contradicted each other in my research, my experience as a historian has taught me that, in most instances, it is safest to trust the earliest accounts as the most accurate.
This has not been an easy course to take, and I realize that to some, it may seem a form of sacrilege to take issue with anyone as central to the story as Emmett Till’s mother or the cousins who were with Till in Mississippi. Yet to the extent that this happens, it is the result of painstakingly weighing multiple accounts of an incident by the same individual, or equally valid accounts by multiple people who experienced the same thing. If I dispute something said by someone decades after the fact, I am usually agreeing with something that same person said in 1955. Since I cannot accept two (or more) contradictory accounts as accurate, I have had to determine which sources are the most reliable and base my conclusions on that. At no time have I begun with an agenda, nor have I sought to prove any preconceived ideas. It is true that I was not a witness to the events of the Till story and thus lack certain knowledge that an eyewitness would. Yet a historian has his or her own advantages in writing about the past, namely, access to a host of primary sources and a determination to evaluate them fairly. One of the reasons this book has taken longer to write than I had originally anticipated is because my commitment to accuracy has forced a long and laborious creative process.
Wherever I have found contradictions or problems, I have done my best to explain them and make a case for why I reached the conclusions I have. Where these explanations do not disrupt the flow of the narrative or sidetrack from it, I explain them in the text. Where it would distract the reader, I deal with them in the endnotes. For this reason, I encourage readers to consult the notes in the back of this book, as they often contain valuable information beyond mere source citation.
This book is divided into two sections. The first is by far the longest, containing ten chapters. Chapter 1 provides background on the lives of Mamie and Emmett Till up until Emmett’s fateful trip to Mississippi. Chapters 2 through 9 deal with the events of the Till case as they unfolded between August 1955 and March 1956. The concluding chapter in part one provides details about the lives of the primary people in the Till case during the years that followed their brief stint in the spotlight.
Part two consists of three chapters and an appendix, which conclude the book. Chapters 11 and 12 deal with the reemergence of the story into the public consciousness after the mid-1980s, through the resulting investigation and closing of the case between 2004 and 2007. Chapter 13 discusses the legacy of Emmett Till. In the appendix, I recap some facts and put forth my own theories about the kidnapping and murder based on all known investigations.
Although I have remained horrified by the Till murder from the time I first learned of it and am sympathetic to the victim as well as his family, all of whose lives were altered as a result, I have tried to keep my emotions out of the narrative. Where the “good guys” in this story made mistakes, I don’t shy away from them. No one is one-dimensional, and even those whose evil deeds set off the chain of events in this story need to be understood as best they can. Unfortunately, only two members of the families of the accused killers would talk to me or answer questions. One could tell me very little about their relative in a way that I might better understand him. Hopefully, the families all know by now that I was willing.
PROLOGUE
Through a Glass, Darkly
Saturday, June 4, 2005. Fifty mourners gathered under a white tent and watched solemnly as eight pallbearers unloaded a shiny blue casket from a green hearse at Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip, Illinois. Those eight, mostly cousins of the deceased, walked the casket to an open grave, placed it on the lowering device, and then paused for a forty-minute service. Afterward, the crowd dispersed, and a fourteen-year-old boy was laid to rest.
For some of those there, this was a moment of déjà vu. Emmett Till, the boy being mourned, had died fifty years earlier. His body was about to occupy this grave for a second time. During two graveside services held a half-century apart, family members in attendance longed for answers. Both times, they longed for justice. The exhumation that led to Emmett’s reburial was necessary to help secure both. Two days earlier, medical examiners conducted the first autopsy ever performed on the body, and it would reveal more than had ever been known about just how young Till died all those years ago.
One of those who had twice witnessed the solemn scene at Burr Oak was Wheeler Parker Jr. The first time, he was a shaken sixteen-year-old, still traumatized over the brutal death of his friend and cousin. Now, as a sixty-six-year-old minister, he was there to eulogize Emmett from the perspective of time and some degree of healing. He had spent the day before wondering what to say at the service, and when he closed his barbershop for the night, he went home to seek guidance through prayer.
A large storage shed stood near the cemetery office; and inside was another casket, this one, empty. It was not new and shiny, but had just spent five decades below ground. Its brown exterior had faded from age and the elements. Inside, the once white, soft fabric that lined the lid was torn, brittle, and had become discolored from the rust that had rubbed off the metal. Until just a couple of days earlier, this box had held Emmett Till’s remains since 1955.
In February 2007, in the midst of a Chicago blizzard, I visited Burr Oak Cemetery and, knowing that the casket was in storage, I asked Carolyn Towns, the cemetery manager, to let me see it. She kindly obliged and asked a worker to take me into the shed. When we went inside, he removed a thick canvas that covered the casket, opened the lid, and left me to myself. It was an emotional moment as I suddenly felt part of history, as my fingerprints joined countless others left before me that investigators found to be in pristine condition after all these years. Knowing this would likely be the only time I would be given this opportunity, I stood there for what seemed like forever.
Back in September 1955, tens of thousands of mourners had stood in long lines at a Chicago church in order to file by this very casket and see the effects of racism at its extreme. The victim, showing every sign of hate imaginable, had been covered with a clear glass viewing panel so that people could see but not touch the body and be spared of its smell. Suddenly, I became one of those who had touched that same lid, placed my hand on that same glass, and looked inside. Although the casket was empty now, I leaned over and imagined that I was staring at the beaten, bloated, and decomposing face of Emmett Till as had thousands of others so many years earlier. I wanted to feel that same horror. I wanted to be one with them.
Yet when I looked into the casket, however, I found that the glass had also suffered from fifty years below ground. It had darkened to the point that I could hardly see through to the padding upon which Emmett had once lain. Because it was no longer a window but a mirror, I saw something that thousands before me had not—a reflection.
I immediately noted the irony. There I was, looking into a darkened glass, but those who came before me had been looking through a glass, darkly, to borrow the words of the biblical Apostle Paul, even though the glass in a very literal sense had been crystal clear for them. In other words, time had not yet enabled them to grasp the significance of the Emmett Till story in the same way that I, as a historian living in a new era, was able to do. Yet I was sufficiently humbled almost immediately as I tried to make s
ense of the fact that my seeing Emmett Till through my imagination had been blocked. I could not see him because all I could see was myself.
This realization forced me to pause for self-reflection as I drove from the cemetery. Yes, I had escaped the racist mindset embraced by most southern whites at the time Emmett Till was buried the first time, but I realized most powerfully that day that this may be so only as a matter of luck. What if I had been born early enough to have been an adult male in 1955 or had been born in Mississippi? The likelihood that I would have seen this tragic murder through different eyes is almost certain. In other words, I am horrified by this tragedy and others like it because I was born at a time and place that allowed me to bypass the prejudices that millions of others could not. As I drove away, I wondered why our common humanity has not been sufficient on its own to stamp out the trappings of cultural conditioning where that conditioning is so deplorable.
Whatever the answer, the questions are important enough that history needs a revisit now and then.
Wheeler Parker finally decided on a theme to eulogize his cousin, Emmett Till, going with the all-important question, “What is life?” As Parker explained it, “We’re put on this earth to give back. . . . His life meant far more because of the way he died, his sacrifice. His voice still cries out to us for justice.”
The story that follows tells us why.
He’s been dead 30 years and I can’t see why it can’t stay dead.
—Roy Bryant on Emmett Till, 1985
Emmett Till is dead and gone. . . . Why can’t people
leave the dead alone and quit trying to stir things up?
—Roy Bryant, 1992
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