Delta Fragments: The Recollections of a Sharecropper's Son

Emmett Till

Emmett Till The majority—by no means all, but the majority—of the white people in Mississippi 1) either approve Big Milam’s action or else 2) they don’t disapprove enough to risk giving their “enemies” the satisfaction of a conviction. William Bradford Huie, Look magazine Without a doubt, the most significant event of my youth was the lynching of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy, in August 1955. At first, the anger and horror were directed not so much at the perpetrators of this heinous act as they were toward Emmett Till and his family. What seemed even more appalling was that the reaction of the black community didn’t seem to be that much different from that in the white neighborhoods. The case provided a clear object lesson on the importance of staying in one’s place. Black mothers reassured themselves that this couldn’t happen to any of their children because they knew better. “Poor Emmett Till,” we heard people say. “His parents should have taught him how to behave in the South.” Blacks and whites could at least agree on this one thing: “That boy couldn’t have been from around here.” His mother, who was born in the Delta, of course, had warned him about white women in the South. She specifically told him that if he were to cross paths with a white woman, he should cross the street and drop his head. In no case should he make eye contact. Emmett Till 154 What else could a parent do? Perhaps, she might have done what a number of our parents actually did: scold and whip us as a reminder that coming into contact with a white woman was a certain death sentence. I was eleven years old at the time but had learned what Richard Wright called “the ethics of living Jim Crow” so well that the fate that had befallen Emmett Till most likely would not have been mine.1 My mother used this case as yet another reminder of how to act around white folks. In speaking of the murder in these terms, I realize that I run the risk of justifying this despicable act or, at least, of placing as much blame for it on Till as on his confessed killers, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam. This is certainly not my intention. The real culprit was a code that locked individuals into such predetermined roles that the slightest deviation from them was considered an unpardonable sin. There were certain cardinal features of the code that had to be observed by all players in the southern drama, black or white: (1) Individuals were not equal: whites were superior, blacks inferior. (2) There was a preordained place for the two races. Everyone had to stay in his or her place. (3) White women were sacred, and black men naturally lusted after them. They had to be kept apart by any and all means. This groundless and indefensible code, together with its various corollaries, determined all interaction between blacks and whites in the Mississippi Delta. Perhaps Milam and Bryant felt they were acting within this code, which they understood and thought that Emmett Till should have known and understood as well. So, when Till was unrepentant and said that he was as good as they were and that he had, indeed, “had” white women, Milam and Bryant saw this breach of southern ethics as intolerable. They had no choice but to act.2 While there are conflicting reports regarding certain details, there seems to be enough agreement about the case that a general picture emerges. In August 1955, Emmett Till, called “Bobo” by his mother, went to visit his greatuncle , Mose Wright, in Money, Mississippi, a small hamlet about eleven miles from Greenwood. In so doing, the young teenager made a journey that many others before and after him made. Since the Great Migration of the twentieth century , Chicago has been a second home or haven for blacks from the Mississippi 155 Emmett Till Delta and other parts of the South. Almost every black in Chicago has relatives in the South and vice-versa, and travel between the two regions is common. On Wednesday, August 25, 1955, around 7:30 pm, a group of eight teenagers , including one girl, arrived at the store where Carolyn Bryant, the twentyone -year-old wife of Roy Bryant, was working. Apparently...