Emmett was helpful around the house, and even did the laundry and cooking in exchange for Mamie being their provider. He sometimes forgot to do his morning chores, however, and left for school expecting Mamie to do them. She always refused, except when Emmett forgot to feed his dog, Mike. When that happened, Emmett would leave a note where Mamie would be sure to see it. “Mama feed Mike. He’s hungry. Poor dog.”87
Like most kids, Emmett thought about his future, and he talked about becoming a motorcycle cop or a professional baseball player. He had dreams of building his grandmother a new church and even talked of joining the air force after he heard that a boy could sign up at sixteen with a parent’s permission.88
Religion played a major role in his life, as it did with Alma and Mamie. After the move to Chicago in 1951, Mamie and Emmett resumed their affiliation with the Argo Church of God in Christ, a church Alma had helped found in 1926. Mamie could not always attend because she worked Sundays, but Emmett would go each week, making the hour-long ride on the Sixty-Third Street bus by himself. One Sunday while Emmett was on his way home from his Sunday meetings, he became engaged in conversation and prayer with Bennie Goodwin, son of the church’s pastor. It was on this occasion that Emmett found Christ.89 Even so, he did not appear particularly religious to his friends. As children, “you had to go to Church,” insisted Wheeler Parker. “That was every Sunday.”90
Religious or not, Emmett was still a teenage boy, and sometimes he could be all boy. He loved attention but would get upset when he did not get his own way. “He was kind of a tough guy,” said childhood friend Lindsey Hill. “We played marbles together. If he lost, he took all the marbles. I guess you could call him the neighborhood bully. He was bigger than most of us.” To others, such as Parker, that description is inaccurate. “No, I would never call him a bully, just a prankster, [who] loved to have fun.” Simeon Wright said that Emmett took his pranks so far as to pull the fire alarm at school.91 He also loved jokes, and would pay playmate Donny Lee Taylor to tell them. Emmett gave Taylor the nickname “T. Jones” after a character in one of Taylor’s stories. It is a name Taylor has retained ever since. Parker said that Emmett’s outgoing personality made him a “natural-born leader.”92
Emmett never had a girlfriend, but at age eleven, he went on his first date. He confidently rode the streetcar, picked up the girl, and took her to a movie, although he made her buy her own ticket.93 Yet in general Emmett showed a shy, less-confident side of himself around girls. “When it came to talking to me, I don’t remember him being as forward as some of the other boys,” said Phyllis Hambrick, another friend. “He used to come around, not to sit on the porch but more to stand at the end of the sidewalk and talk.” Emmett was ridiculed for both his stutter and his weight. “He was a quiet person. I think his stuttering was one of the things that made him shy.”94
In late August 1955, Mamie’s uncle Moses, or “Mose,” Wright visited Chicago from his home in Money, Mississippi, to attend the funeral of his daughter Willie Mae’s father-in-law. While staying with Willie Mae, Wright, a preacher and sharecropper, talked about country life in Mississippi, fishing, and all of the things young boys like to do outdoors. He invited his grandsons Wheeler Parker and Curtis Jones to go back with him. Mose and Wheeler planned to take the train together, and Curtis would go down the following week. Emmett had already been pressuring Mamie to let him visit the South that summer after he learned that some other friends were heading there. But now that Wheeler was going, a trip to the South was all he could think about.95
Mamie granted her son a two-week visit to Mississippi. “I just knew that he was a normal well-adjusted child and that’s why I thought that I could let him go,” she explained. Yet she still needed peace of mind and admonished Wright to use caution. “When you let the boys go to town, please go with them. Take the car keys. If you get six teenagers together, anything can happen.”96 After Wright accepted responsibility for the boys, Mamie felt at ease. “It was perfectly all right with me to let Bo go in his care because I felt he would be in good hands.” Once plans were finalized, Emmett had one week to prepare for his vacation.97
Preparation for the trip included lecturing the boys about southern customs. They had to learn about segregation and the laws that kept blacks as second-class citizens. Wheeler received his talk from his parents, and Mamie schooled her own son.98 Emmett, with his independent and fun-loving ways, had to understand that his personality would not be appreciated or even tolerated by whites in Mississippi. Mamie did not pull any punches and told him that should anything happen down there, “Even though you think you’re perfectly within your right, for goodness sake take low. If necessary, get on your knees and beg apologies. Don’t cross anybody down there because Mississippi is not like Chicago.” For just two weeks, Emmett would need to see the world differently from the way he always had. “No matter how much it seems that you have the right, just forget your rights while you’re in Mississippi.”99
With the trip now a reality, Emmett and Mamie went shopping. Emmett bought new clothes, shoes, and a wallet. While searching through his jewelry box for some cufflinks, he noticed the signet ring that had once belonged to his father. Emmett had not worn it much except when he was younger, and back then, he had to use scotch tape or string to make it snug. As he tried it on now, he discovered that it fit perfectly. “Gee, you are getting to be quite a grown man,” Mamie proudly acknowledged. Emmett decided to wear it to Mississippi.100 Before he left, probably because she too was going on vacation, Mamie gave Emmett’s dog, Mike, to the pound.101
Mose Wright and Wheeler Parker planned to leave together from the Central Street Station on Saturday morning, August 20. Mamie and a friend, Mary Lee, who was visiting from St. Louis, were going to drop off Emmett there in time to meet up with Parker, Wright, and a female cousin who was heading back to Mississippi on the same train. That morning, however, Mamie and Emmett were running behind schedule. Because they lived closer to the Englewood Station at Sixty-Third and Woodlawn, Mamie decided to board Emmett there instead. Still, they were running late, and once they arrived, Mamie delayed things further by having to stop to buy Emmett’s ticket.102 Wright and Parker, who had boarded at the previous stop, were getting nervous, but were soon relieved when Emmett finally came aboard. “If he’d been five minutes later,” noted Wright, “he’d have missed it.”103
Years later, Mamie spoke of what she said were her final moments with Emmett at the station, and one might suspect that her recollections may well have been shaped by the significance of the events that followed. With no time to spare, Emmett ran up the steps to board the train, with seemingly little thought about his mother, who was still standing at the platform.
“Bo. You didn’t kiss me good-bye,” she yelled. “How do I know I’ll ever see you again?”
Slightly embarrassed, Emmett turned around, went back, and gave her a kiss. As an afterthought, he took off his watch and left it with her, but kept the ring. With that, he was off, barely in time to catch the train. Mamie watched until the train left the station, and once it was out of sight, Mamie and Mary Lee left too.104 Later that day, Mamie changed her mind about Mike, went to the dog pound, and picked him up. She wanted to surprise Emmett later.105
Nobody paid any attention when Emmett boarded the train that day, other than Mamie and Mary Lee. Nobody within the hustle and bustle at the platform had any idea that in addition to the countless trains that had carried blacks north to a new level of freedom since World War I, this one train, heading south, would help play a similar yet more dramatic role in that continued process. Mamie Bradley left the station quietly, unnoticed that day; however, when she went to the Central Street station two weeks later to pick up her son, she was met by a crowd and the media. Americans from around the country, including leaders from the president of the United States on down, knew her name and that of Emmett Louis Till. Yet Emmett would be oblivious to it all. He was returning as a mutilated corpse, the victim of a hate crime.
His grief-stricken mother was there to retrieve what was left of him. His murder had become national news, and it would soon make headlines internationally.
That is getting ahead in the story, however. The events that turned this tale into one of the South’s most infamous tragedies began shortly after Emmett Till, Wheeler Parker, and Mose Wright arrived at what was called the most southern place on earth—the Mississippi Delta.
2
Mississippi Welcomes Emmett Till
It was an all-day journey on the Illinois Central Railroad for Mose Wright, Wheeler Parker Jr., and Emmett Till before the train arrived at its stop in Winona, Mississippi. Not surprisingly, Wright had a difficult time keeping Emmett in his seat during the 650-mile trip. “He kept telling him to ‘sit down’ and was trying to make him behave,” remembers Parker. “He was all over the place.”1 Somehow during this rambunctious behavior, Emmett managed to lose his shoes, and once he arrived in Mississippi, he had to borrow a pair from a cousin.2 When the City of New Orleans arrived at the station in the late afternoon, Maurice, Mose Wright’s sixteen-year-old son, was waiting with the family car. Mose and the three boys then headed off to Money, a rural, whistle-stop town in Leflore County, named after the late US senator Hernando De Soto Money.3
Although he had been to Mississippi three times before, Emmett still knew little about life in the Magnolia State. However, it was very familiar to Mose Wright, who had lived his entire life in the region. For nearly forty years he had worked on the 150-acre plantation owned by Grover Cleveland Frederick, namesake of the US president serving when Frederick was born in 1885. Around 1946, Wright moved to a six-room house on the Frederick plantation, located off a gravel road three miles east of town. The Wrights shared this home briefly with Greene and Gertrude Saffold and their seven children, but the Saffolds left after a few weeks and moved to Stockton, California.4
Money sits deep within the Mississippi Delta, the state’s northwest region, known for its fertile soil and abundant cotton harvests. The Delta includes all or part of seventeen of the state’s eighty-two counties. The area was (and still is) primarily rural, but cities like Greenwood, Clarksdale, and Greenville were welcome respites on the weekends. In 1955, cotton and the field hands who produced the crops gave Money its lifeblood, and the town managed to sustain a population of around 400.
Mose Wright, a small man at five feet three inches, found spiritual strength through his love of God and was strong physically after decades of working cotton. By sharecropper standards, he was also comfortable. He owned a car, an electric refrigerator, and a new washing machine. He maintained an adequate garden and kept several chickens, ten hogs, and three dogs. He even held a checking account in Greenwood at the Bank of Commerce. At the time of Emmett’s arrival, Wright’s cotton had just become ready to harvest, and he expected to pick as many as thirty bales off his twenty-five-acre share. At $160 to $175 per bale, Wright would clear around $1,000 after settling up his expenses and splitting half of the profits with Frederick. White neighbors described Wright, an ordained minister in the Church of God in Christ, as “a cut above” other blacks in the community because of the articulate way he expressed himself.5
Moses Wright was born to William and Ann Safford Wright in Durant, Holmes County, less than fifty miles from Money. His mother died when Mose was only a small boy, and his father went on to raise six children alone.6 Wright was not always sure about the year of his birth. Discrepancies about age were not uncommon at the time, especially among those raised in rural areas. He stated on his World War I draft registration in 1917 that he did not know his exact birth date, but believed he was then twenty-seven years old. If he was right, then his birth would have occurred around 1890. In 1930, he said he was then forty, which also indicated a birth year of 1890. By the summer of 1955, however, he had come to believe that he was born in 1891. The 1900 US Census lists his birth as April 1892, and when that record became available after 1970, he came to accept this date himself.7 If correct, this meant that in August 1955, he was sixty-three, not sixty-four as he told reporters a week after returning from Chicago.
On December 16, 1911, the Reverend B. A. Woods married Mose Wright and Lucinda Larry in Holmes County. Wright affirmed by applying for marriage that he was at least twenty-one.8 He may have believed he was within the legal age for males to marry, but he, like his bride, was probably only nineteen. During their marriage, Lucinda, or Linda as she was known, bore four children before her death in the early 1920s.9
Under the provisions of the Selective Service Act of 1917, Mose registered for the draft on August 30 of that year. Once selected for military service, however, he refused to serve on the grounds of conscientious objection. After his defiance landed him in jail for thirty days, news spread throughout the region.10
In the 1920s, Wright began leasing land on the Frederick plantation and was working as an itinerant preacher when he married Elizabeth Smith around 1925.11 The sister of Alma Spearman, Emmett Till’s grandmother, Elizabeth, or “Lizzie,” bore nine children herself, with eight living to maturity. Through his two marriages, Mose Wright had a dozen living children ranging from twelve to forty-two years of age in 1955. Only the three youngest boys, Maurice, Robert, and Simeon, still lived at home.12 For several years Wright led a small congregation at the East Money Church of God in Christ, but stopped preaching in 1949.13
The same year that Mose and Lucinda were married, another family—a white one—got its start in nearby Tallahatchie County. On February 7, 1911, William Leslie Milam married Eula Lee Morgan in Charleston.14 Essley, as he was called, became a farmer. His father, David, had moved to Tallahatchie County from Tennessee, married Adelia Bryan, and raised five children, Essley being the youngest.15 Although Essley and Eula affirmed by their signatures that they had reached the legal age to marry, they were both, in fact, underage. Essley was just eighteen and Eula fifteen when they wed.16
Between 1915 and 1925, Eula bore five sons before Essley died of pneumonia in 1927, an illness brought on after he broke several bones during a gravel pit accident. The pit caved in on him and others working for the Tallahatchie highways; another man died while two others were injured in the accident.17 A year later, on October 31, 1928, Essley’s thirty-three-year-old widow married eighteen-year-old Henry Bryant, and by 1935 Eula had given birth to six more children. Henry, an abusive alcoholic, left Eula in 1947, and the couple avoided any further contact until Eula filed for divorce in 1949. Throughout 1955 and 1956, she used the courts to force Henry to pay the required $15 monthly support for their one minor child, an obligation he had failed to keep on his own.18
The large Milam-Bryant clan eventually owned general stores throughout the Mississippi Delta. By August 1955, there was one in Money, owned by son Roy Bryant; Eula ran one in Sharkey County; Henry kept his own store at Curtis Station, eighty miles north of Money in Panola County; and daughter Mary Louise and her husband, Melvin Campbell, owned a grocery in Minter City, Leflore County. Another son, John Milam, known as J. W., had operated his own store in Glendora, Tallahatchie County, but it burned down the year before. Other family stores were operating in Swan Lake, Itta Bena, and Ruleville.19
Both the Wright and Milam-Bryant families were large, but here the similarities end—other than the fact that members in each family knew very well their privileges or their place in society. Such rights or limitations were all dependent upon race, and this concept was well ingrained in Mississippians from birth. By quietly accepting their second-class status in southern society and obeying the rules of etiquette forced upon them, African Americans could survive peacefully in their communities. Whites often took on a paternalistic role in their relationships to blacks, but this did not imply a belief among Caucasians that the two races were equal.20
Emmett Till’s visit to the Mississippi Delta would forever link these two families together in the history books of American race relations, despite the fact that they had known little, if any, interaction previously. His timing in
coming to the Delta could hardly have been worse. He arrived in Mississippi just before voters decided the 1955 gubernatorial race. All five candidates who sought the governor’s office over the course of the election had based their platform on the preservation of segregation.21 This was all in response to the recent Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which had ruled in May 1954 that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional.22
The white backlash to Brown was immediate, and dozens of chapters of Citizens’ Councils arose all across the state. Their aim was to overturn Brown and maintain segregation forever.23 Lynchings, which had long plagued Mississippi and the South in general, returned after a four-year hiatus, and those seeking any semblance of black equality quickly became targets.24 On May 7, 1955, fifty-one-year-old Rev. George W. Lee, active in the NAACP and black voter registration in Belzoni, Humphreys County, was shot in the face as he drove home from a dry cleaner’s shop at around midnight. His assailant was never caught.25
Three months later, on August 13, 1955, World War I veteran Lamar Smith, sixty-three, was shot dead on the courthouse steps in Brookhaven, Lincoln County, as he passed out voting literature to black citizens. His murder occurred in front of witnesses in broad daylight. Three men were arrested, but when witnesses refused to talk, a grand jury failed to indict.26 Clearly, in the aftermath of Brown, racial tensions were on the rise and getting uglier.
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