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5 1 WE HAVE JUST STARTED OUR WORK Two knees jutting from the shallow water along the riverbank attracted Robert Hodges’s attention. The seventeen-year-old boy fishing in the Tallahatchie River just north of rural Money, Mississippi, wasn’t sure what he had found. But it looked like a human body. Shortly thereafter, on August , , Tallahatchie County sheri ff’s deputies fished from the water a grotesque, decomposing body of a fourteen-year-old black boy. The body proved to be that of Emmett “Bobo” Till, a Chicago youth who had been abducted from his uncle’s sharecropper ’s house by two white men in the early morning hours of August . Several days before, Till had allegedly walked into Roy Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in the small town of Money to buy some candy. Before leaving, according to Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, Till asked her for a date and placed his hands on her waist. As he was leaving—this is one part of the incident corroborated by Till’s companions—he said, “Bye, baby,” and whistled at her. If Carolyn Bryant’s testimony was truthful, Till’s actions amounted to suicide by redneck—a dangerous and deadly breach of the South’s Jim Crow code that violently protected the honor of white women against the sexual advances of black men. If Till only whistled at Bryant, it was still a reckless and foolish act. Before he left Chicago for his summer vacation, Till’s mother had instructed the teenager on the ways of her native Mississippi. “If you’re walking down the street and a white woman is walking toward you, step off the sidewalk, lower your head,” Mamie Till told her son. “Wait until she passes by, then get back on the sidewalk, keep going, don’t look back.” The exact circumstances of Till’s encounter with Bryant are unknown. What is certain is that by the time twenty-four-year-old Roy Bryant returned to Money, much of the population of the rural county—black and white—knew about the incident. If he didn’t defend his wife’s “honor,” WHEN FREEDOM WOULD TRIUMPH 6 Bryant knew he would be labeled a coward. Therefore, with the help of his half-brother, J. W. Milam, Bryant abducted Till, intending to “whip him . . . and scare some sense into him.” In the face of Till’s unrepentant and defiant attitude, the evening took an ugly and deadly turn. After beating Till to a bloody pulp, the two men used barbed wire to tie a seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan around his neck. After shooting him in the head, the men dumped his lifeless body into the Tallahatchie River, where Robert Hodges found him several days later. Bryant and Milam were soon arrested for kidnapping and later charged with Till’s murder. Till’s mother, meanwhile, notified reporters about her son’s abduction and subsequent murder. She demanded her son’s return to Chicago. When the body arrived, she overruled a written agreement with Mississippi authorities who insisted on a closed-casket service and forbade the funeral home from making her son’s mutilated body more presentable. “Let the world see what I’ve seen,” she told the funeral director. Later, she wrote, “The whole nation had to bear witness to this.” The nation did bear witness. Mamie Till’s determination to share her grief with the country—more than one hundred thousand mourners filed past Till’s open casket in four days—turned her son into a worldwide martyr for human rights. Several weeks later, the summary acquittals of the two defendants by an all-white jury sparked a wave of outrage throughout the nation and the world, particularly among the U.S. news media, which had paid scant attention to the plight of southern blacks. More important, the Till case aroused and emboldened blacks across the nation, who finally began to believe that perhaps—just perhaps —they might someday enjoy the rights of full citizenship denied for so long. Only two months after the acquittals in the Till case, another dramatic incident further heightened the nation’s consciousness about southern race relations. By refusing to carry her exhausted body to the back of an Alabama bus on December , , seamstress Rosa Parks sparked a grassroots movement among blacks to secure their civil rights. Although the resulting citywide boycott of the Montgomery City Lines—led by twentysix -year-old Baptist minister Martin Luther King Jr...

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