By: Keith A. Beauch
Emmett Louis Till was a fourteen-year-old African American born July 25, 1941 on the south side of Chicago, Ill. He was murdered by Roy Bryant and his half brother, John W. Milam, in Money, Mississippi. on August 28, 1955 for “Wolf Whistling” at Carolyn Bryant, wife of Roy Bryant.
When Emmett was two years old, his father, a soldier, was hanged in the Italian campaign of WWII directed by General Dwight D. Eisenhower. At five, he contracted the polio that made him stutter. At fourteen, he had just finished the eighth grade. At McCosh Elementary, in Chicago, Emmett, “Bobo” as he was called, was known as a 160 pound, energetic, practical jokester who was a fair student always at the center of attention. One of his teachers described Emmett as a natural leader. Saturday, August 20, 1955, Emmett and his cousin, Wheeler Parker, boarded the Illinois Central train to visit Emmett’s great-uncle, Mose Wright, his second cousin, Simeon Wright, his cousins Maurice and Robert Wright, and friends, all of whom he had visited before in the Mississippi Delta, near Money, Mississippi. They arrived in Mississippi on Sunday, August 21st. With their stories of life in Chicago, the two cousins were the center of attention. Monday morning, Emmett and his cousins began picking cotton for his great-uncle, Mose Wright, a sharecropper whose farm was near Money, Mississippi.
On Wednesday, August 24th, Emmett (14), along with Simeon (12), Maurice (16) Wright, Wheeler Parker (16), Roosevelt Crawford (15) and Ruthie Mae Crawford (18), went into town, Money, Mississippi, after a day of picking cotton. Each had a few pennies for candy, bubble gum, and soft drinks. Downtown Money, Mississippi. consisted of four buildings, one of which was Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, owned and operated by Roy Bryant. The Bryant’s store catered to African-American field hands, so African Americans often hung around the store playing checkers and otherwise having fun after a day in the fields picking cotton. Carolyn Bryant, wife of Roy Bryant, and Juanita Milam, wife of J.W. Milam, ran the store that afternoon. Roy Bryant was away.
Wheeler Parker went into Bryant’s Grocery first, made his purchase, and returned outside, rejoining his friends. Emmett then went into the store for his purchase. Simeon Wright, Emmett’s cousin, went into the store to get Emmett who was then on his way out. Ruthie Mae, the only female among the Black teenagers, watched Emmett through the store window the whole time that he was in the store. She saw Emmett Till place the money into Carolyn Bryant’s hand, rather than on the counter as he was supposed to do. An eyewitness to Emmett’s actions inside Bryant’s store, she would have seen any unusual gesture towards Carolyn Bryant had Emmett made any. The testimony of Ruthie Mae, and that of Wheeler Parker, is still available. In court, Carolyn Bryant testified that Emmett Till grabbed her around the waist and made lewd acts toward her.
Carolyn Bryant followed Emmett and Simeon outside the door of the store. As soon as she came outside of the store, Emmett turned around and “wolf-whistled” at her. Someone yelled that Carolyn was going to get a gun, so the boys jumped into Mose Wright’s car and headed home, Mose’s cabin. While the car was racing down the highway they looked back to find a car overtaking them. Thinking that the car contained Carolyn Bryant with her pistol, they quickly pulled to the side of the road, ditched their vehicle and ran into one of the cotton fields. They had not been followed. Carolyn Bryant never told her husband about the incident with Emmett Till, whom she did not know. But because of the number of African-American men outside of Bryant’s Grocery at the time, the news of Emmett Till’s “wolf-whistle” began to circulate around the African-American community. Emmett, his cousins, and his friends agreed not to tell Mose Wright, fearing that the boys would be sent home, back to Chicago, before their vacation was up.
Informed of the incident two days later, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J.W. Milam, began looking for Emmett Till. They found him at 2 a.m. the morning of August 28, 1955 at his uncle’s cabin. Entering the cabin with flashlights and Colt 45 pistols, they carried Emmett away, “To teach him a lesson,” they later reported to William Bradford Huie, a journalist for Look magazine. Three days later, on August 31, 1955, Emmett Till’s corpse was pulled from the depths of the Tallahatchie River, with a 75-pound cotton gin fan tethered to his neck with barbed wire, his right eye hanging midway to his cheek, his nose flattened, and a bullet hole through his head.
After days of lobbying state officials, Emmett’s mother obtained a writ of court ordering the Mississippi sheriff to release Emmett Till’s body for return to Chicago. The court order was received three hours before Emmett was to be buried in Mississippi without notice to his relatives, without ceremony, and without witnesses. Upon releasing Emmett’s body, the sheriff ordered the casket pad-locked and sealed with the Mississippi State seal. He prohibited anyone from opening it. In Chicago, Funeral Home Director, A.A. Rayner, obeying sheriff’s order, refused to open the box containing Emmett’s body. When he told Emmett’s mother his decision, she demanded a hammer, because she said, “I need to see my son.” The late, Mamie Till-Mobley, describes the corpse of her son she saw on September 2, 1955, in Chicago as follows:
I decided that I would start with his feet, gathering strength as I went up. I paused at his mid-section, because I knew that he would not want me looking at him. But I saw enough to know that he was in tact. I kept on up until I got to his chin. Then I was forced to deal with his face. I saw that his tongue was choked out. The right eye was lying midway of his chest. His nose had been broken like someone took a meat chopper and broke his nose in several places. I kept looking and I saw a hole, which I presumed was a bullet hole, and I could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side. I wondered, “Was it necessary to shoot him”?
Mr. Rayner, she says, asked me, “Do you want me to touch the body up?” I said, “No. Let the people see what I have seen. I think everybody needs to know what had happened to Emmett Till.”