by Chris Crowe
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 - THE BOY WHO TRIGGERED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
CHAPTER 2 - KICKING THE HORNETS’ NEST
CHAPTER 3 - THE BOY FROM CHICAGO
CHAPTER 4 - THE WOLF WHISTLE
CHAPTER 5 - SETTING THE STAGE
CHAPTER 6 - GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
CHAPTER 7 - AFTERSHOCKS
TIME LINE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ON THE EMMETT TILL CASE
FOR FURTHER READING
Published by Dial Books for Young Readers
A division of Penguin Young Readers Group
345 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2003 by Chris Crowe
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Crowe, Chris.
Getting away with murder : the true story of the Emmett Till case / by
Chris Crowe.
p. cm.
Summary: Presents a true account of the murder of fourteen-year-old
Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955.
eISBN : 978-1-101-07618-7
1. Till, Emmett, 1941—1955—Juvenile literature. 2. Mississippi—Race relations—Juvenile literature.
3. Lynching—Mississippi—History—20th century—Juvenile literature.
4. African Americans—Crimes against—Mississippi—History—20th century—Juvenile literature.
5. African American teenage boys—Mississippi—Biography—Juvenile literature.
6. Racism—Mississippi—History—20th century—Juvenile literature.
7. Trials (Murder)—Mississippi—Juvenile literature.
[1. Till, Emmett, 1941-1955. 2. Lynching. 3. African Americans. 4. Racism. 5. Trials (Murder).] I. Title.
F350.N4 C76 2003
364.15’23’09762—dc21 2002005736
PHOTO CREDITS:
“New Story On Murder Of Till” reprinted with permission of the Associated Press.
Quotation from For Us, The Living © 1967 by Myrlie Evers-Williams and William Peters.
http://us.penguingroup.com
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people have helped me complete this book, and I offer my sincere thanks for their support and cooperation: the student employees at BYU’s Interlibrary Loan Office; Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till Mobley; computer guru Joseph Palmer; researchers Shauna Barnes Belknap, Lisa Hale, Christina Youngberg, and Brooke Anderson; the staffs at the Library of Congress, the Bettman/Corbis Photo Archives, AP/Wide World Photos, Time/Life Photo Archives, The Chicago Defender, and the BYU English Department. Special thanks to Claude Jones of The Commercial Appeal in Memphis for his generous cooperation in providing trial photographs. At Phyllis Fogelman Books, I am grateful to designer Kimi Weart and to associate editor Rebecca Waugh for their help in developing this book. Without the patience, insight, and support of Phyllis Fogelman, this project never would have been finished; I thank her for giving me the opportunity to tell the story of Emmett Till. My thanks also go to Mildred D. Taylor, an awe-inspiring writer, who first sent me in search of Emmett. My good friends Carol Lynch Williams and Jesse Crisler, both of whom are talented writers and readers, provided steady support and feedback throughout this project. My agent, Patricia J. Campbell, gave me the courage to tackle this book and opened just the right doors to get it published. Finally, to my wife, Elizabeth, and my daughters Carrie and Joanne, thank you for listening to so many awful stories from 1955 and for giving me the kind of feedback and encouragement I so desperately needed.
“ I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
—Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963
I have the same dream for my four children and for all children who live in our land of the free. I dedicate this book to them.
INTRODUCTION
I was born near Chicago, Illinois, in 1954, just one year before fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Though his death and the trial of his murderers received national press coverage and especially intense attention in his hometown of Chicago, my parents recall nothing at all of the case or the news coverage of the trial.
But parents can’t know everything, so school should have introduced me to this landmark civil rights event, but it didn’t. Through elementary school, junior high, high school, college, and graduate school I never once read nor heard anything about Emmett Till. It wasn’t until I was writing a book about the life and works of Newbery-winning author Mildred D. Taylor that I first encountered Emmett. In one of her essays, Taylor made a reference to a fourteen-year-old African American boy who had been murdered in her home state of Mississippi in 1955. I followed up on the reference to Emmett just to make sure it wasn’t something I should include in my book about Taylor.
What I found stunned me: a gruesome photograph of this boy from Chicago, lying in a casket, his face and head horribly disfigured. The article that accompanied the photo grabbed my interest, not because it had anything to do with Mildred D. Taylor, but because it detailed a critical moment in American civil rights history that I, with all of my years of schooling and reading, had never learned. This article piqued my interest, and I dug some more, eventually finding two very helpful books about the case, Clenora Hudson-Weems‘s Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement and Stephen J. Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. Plater Robinson and his Soundprint radio documentary “The Murder of Emmett Till” also provided invaluable background information about the case.
So, who was Emmett Till and why hadn’t I learned about him?
My research in the last few years has shown that most white Americans have never heard of him, and a review of history textbooks suggests why. In a survey of twenty-one high school U.S. history books published since 1990, I found that every book included information about two famous civil rights events: the Supreme Court integration ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Montgomery bus boycott started by Rosa Parks. Sadly, only two books mentioned Emmett Till, and those books used a combined total of less than fifty words to describe his place in American history. Neither book suggested that Emmett’s murder was the catalyst it was for the civil rights movement.
But most African Americans know well his story and its place in history.
In addition to the thousands of people who attended Emmett’s three-day viewing and the funeral that followed, hundreds of thousands more, including Mildred D. Taylor, read about his murder and the trial in the African American media of the time. The most sensational coverage of the murder, which included the photo of Emmett’s battered body resting in his casket, appeared in Jet magazine, and today, many middle-aged African Americans mark the moment by recollecting, “I remember when I saw the photo of Emmett Till in Jet magazine ...” similar to the way many white Americans mark the moment they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Emmett’s murder in August 1955 and the sham trial that followed it infuriated African Americans everywhere. For many, the brazen murder of a boy by two white men was the last straw in centuries of racial oppression and abuse. Even before Emmett’s death, African American activists had been working to formalize a civil rights movement, but the outrage that followed his death and the acquittal of his murderers finally launched the movement to combat racism in the United States.
To understand and appreciate the modern history of the fight for equal rights for Afr
ican Americans, American teenagers of all races should know the story of Emmett Till and its impact on American society. This book will, I hope, keep alive the memory of the Emmett Till case and provide a broader understanding of the beginning of the civil rights movement.
In Memoriam
Emmett Louis Till, 1941-1955
“A little nobody who shook up the world. ”
—Mamie Till Bradley
GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER
Scene of the kidnapping: the home of Mose Wright, Emmett Till’s great-uncle
CHAPTER 1
THE BOY WHO TRIGGERED THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
In August 1955, a group of white men murdered a fourteen-year-old Black boy in the Mississippi Delta. News of the murder and the trial that followed it outraged Black and sympathetic white Americans across the nation, and reaction to the famous murder case played an important role as a catalyst for the civil rights movement.
This is a true account of the people and events connected to the murder of Emmett Till.
Sunday, August 25, 1955, a few miles outside Money, Mississippi
It was after 2:00 A.M. when the killers’ car, its headlaghts off, coasted to a stop on the gravel road about fifty feet from the darkened sharecropper’s shack. When the car engine shut down, the steady thrum of locusts resumed, filling the humid night air with a pulsing buzz.
Shadows from the persimmon and cedar trees in the yard cloaked two white men as they emerged from the sedan and spoke to a man and a woman in the backseat. When they finished their brief conversation, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Milam, walked boldly toward the shack with vengeance on their minds. Milam, the bigger of the two, carried a long flashlight in one hand and an Army-issue .45 pistol in the other.
The brothers walked through the screened front porch of the cotton field shack and stopped at the door, ready for action.
Bryant pounded on the door.
The shack remained silent.
He pounded again and shouted, “Preacher! Preacher, get up and open this door!”
Someone moved inside the darkened house, and soon a voice called out, “Who’s that?”
“This is Mr. Bryant, Preacher. From Money.”
“All right, suh.” The door slowly swung open, and a thin Black man, sixty-four-year-old Mose “Preacher” Wright, stepped out onto the porch.
Milam shined the flashlight into Wright’s face and pointed his gun at the old man. “You got two boys from Chicago here?”
“Yessuh.” He nodded back into the house. “They’s sleeping.”
Milam stepped closer. “I want the one who done the talkin’ in Money. Is he here?”
“Yessuh.” The old man’s voice trembled.
Bryant nodded. “Well, then, we need to talk to him.”
With the flashlight casting eerie shadows through the dark shack, Wright led the two white men to a back bedroom where fourteen-year-old Emmett “Bobo” Till slept with three of his cousins.
Bryant shook Emmett Till awake while Milam shined the flashlight in the boy’s face. When he awoke, Milam asked, “Are you the boy who did the talking?”
“Yeah, ” replied Emmett.
“Don’t say yeah’ to me, nigger,” snarled Milam. “I’ll blow your head off. Now get up and get your clothes on. ”
Emmett sat up on the bed and began dressing while his great-uncle, Mose, pleaded for him. “He ain’t got good sense because he was raised up in Chicago. The boy didn’t know what he was doing. Don’t take him. ”
By now the commotion had brought Emmett’s great-aunt, Elizabeth Wright, into the room, and she begged the white men to leave Emmett alone. “Listen, we’ll pay you whatever you want to charge; we’ll pay you if you’ll release him.”
“You’d best get yourself back in that bed of yours, girl, ” snapped Milam. “Do it now—I want to hear those springs. ”
With tears in her eyes, Elizabeth Wright left the room.
Emmett continued to dress, oblivious to the danger that was unfolding around him. He reached for his socks and Milam stopped him.
“Just the shoes, boy. We got to hurry. ”
“I don’t wear shoes without socks, ” said Emmett. His kidnappers cursed him for making them wait while he pulled on his socks and then a pair of canvas shoes with thick crepe soles.
When the boy was dressed, Milam and Bryant pushed him through the house and out to the porch. Mose Wright tried one more time to save his nephew. “Just take him out in the yard and whip him, and I’ll be satisfied. ” But the two men ignored his plea.
Before they stepped into the yard, Milam turned and asked Wright if he recognized them.
“Nosuh, I don’t know you. ”
“Good, Preachei-. How old are you?”
“Sixty-four.”
“Well, if you decide later that you do know any of us here tonight, you’ll never live to be sixty-five.”
“But where are you taking him?” asked Wright.
“Nowhere if he’s not the right one,” said Milam.
Mose Wright and his wife watched from the porch while the two men walked Emmett to their car. Bryant forced Emmett close to the back window and asked, “Is this the boy?”
“Yes, ” said the woman from the backseat.
Bryant shoved Emmett into the front seat, sat next to him, and pulled the door closed. Milam got behind the wheel, and the car, its lights still off, moved into the dark, taking the boy from Chicago with them.
His naked and mutilated body would be found by a fisherman three days later in the Tallahatchie River.1
The kidnapping and murder of Emmett Till and the trial of his killers became one of the biggest news items of 1955. The viewing of his disfigured corpse at Rainer Funeral Home and his funeral at the Roberts Temple of the Church of God in Christ in Chicago attracted more than ten thousand mourners. The grisly open-casket photo of Emmett that appeared in Jet magazine horrified and angered hundreds of thousands more. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), other civil rights organizations, and political leaders expressed outrage at the cold-blooded murder of this boy from Chicago. In an interview, Roy Wilkins, Executive Secretary of the NAACP, labeled the crime a racist act, saying, “It would appear that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.” Newspapers across the country, especially those in the Northern states, condemned the killing and the racist attitudes that led to it.
A huge crowd gathers in front of Roberts Temple of the Church of God in Christ, the Chicago church that held Emmett Till’s funeral
The protests and condemnations from civil rights leaders and Northerners poked an already raw nerve in the South. The white leaders in Southern states like Mississippi that enforced Jim Crow laws, regulations that segregated Blacks from whites, were still stinging from the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which declared that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional. In May of 1955, the Supreme Court pushed the issue even further when it ordered that integration of schools must proceed “with all deliberate speed.” The two rulings alarmed Southern leaders who feared that the federal government and Northern agitators planned to destroy the Southern way of life. Comments from a speech given by the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, typify the attitude of many white Southerners regarding forced desegregation of public schools:“Since the infamous Supreme Court decision rendered in 1954, we in Montgomery and the South have been put to a severe test by those who seek to destroy our time-honored customs.
“Not since Reconstruction have our customs been in such jeopardy.... We can, will and must resist outside forces hell-bent on our destruction....”
Despite the Supreme Court’s intentions, citizens in the South knew that efforts to change the South would be resisted. A prediction by an editor of the Jackson Daily News foreshadowed the violence that would stir up Mississippi, setting the stage for Emmett Till’s murder: “Mississippi will not obey the
decision. If an effort is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps.”
The defensiveness triggered by the desegregation mandate prompted many white Southerners to take offense at the widespread criticism in the media regarding Emmett’s murder. Angry editorials like the one published in the September 2, 1955, issue of The Greenwood Commonwealth appeared in newspapers in Mississippi and across the South complaining that Southerners were being unfairly criticized for the isolated actions of two men. Even the governor of Mississippi, Hugh White, reacted in the press: “Mississippi deplores such conduct on the part of its citizens and certainly cannot condone it. This is not a lynching. It is straight out murder.” By claiming that Emmett’s death was not a lynching, the governor hoped to defend his state from the Northern and liberal press that considered the murder a racially motivated crime.
The intense media coverage in the weeks between Emmett’s death and the trial of his killers focused worldwide attention on the legal proceedings that would be held in a sleepy little town in the Mississippi Delta, exposing to the world the cruel racial intolerance that existed in the South. Enormous changes in the Southern way of life would soon follow. Thirty years after the case, a former NAACP official said, “I think sometimes that the hand of God was in the whole thing. White men had been killing Black boys down here for years without anybody making much of a fuss. The Emmett Till case became a cog in the wheel of change. Perhaps we have television to thank for that. Television and the printed media turned the spotlight on Mississippi.”