It’s been called the “big bang” of the civil rights movement. Sixty years ago this month (Aug. 28), a 14-year-old black Chicago boy was brutally murdered in Mississippi. Emmett Till apparently had said the wrong thing to a white woman, and paid for it with his life. At the insistence of his mother, his mutilated body was displayed in an open casket, seen by tens of thousands in Chicago and by many more through photos in the black press. The murder trial in Mississippi then became an international media event. All of this was the subject of “Death of Innocence” (2003), which Christopher Benson, now a University of Illinois professor, co-wrote with Emmett Till’s mother – and which he is now adapting into a screenplay for a planned film. Benson, a professor of journalism and of African American studies, discussed Till’s story and its significance with News Bureau social sciences editor Craig Chamberlain.
That “big bang” quote comes from Jesse Jackson, and some might say it’s hyperbole. Why do you think otherwise?
It’s apt when you consider the full context of this story. The 1955 lynching of Emmett Till was a point of convergence. American apartheid had been struck down in the Brown v. Board of Education decisions of 1954 and 1955. So there was a new sense of validation among African-Americans, new fuel, in pushing for enforcement of civil rights.
Also, television was coming of age and was able to reach a wide audience with the impacting images and immediacy of events that began to unfold – starting with this story. Journalist David Halberstam, who covered the trial, would write years later that it was the “first great media event of the Civil Rights Movement.” Many journalists who had fought against totalitarian regimes during World War II came home to view the “way of life” in the South through a new critical lens, and their coverage reflected that.
Then there were the actions of Emmett’s mother, the late Mamie Till-Mobley, a diminutive, apolitical woman who once described herself as too naive to walk the streets alone. She was transformed by the brutal lynching of her son, stepped up and began making decisions that set everything in motion, forcing a nation to gaze upon the horrible face of race hatred that had been beaten into the once-beautiful face of her child. She opened a casket and opened our eyes to a reality people no longer could ignore.
It is estimated that more than 100,000 people filed by Emmett’s glass-topped casket over four days. And they would never turn away again. Up to this moment in August 1955, the struggle for racial equality had been largely a legal struggle, an elite project of ideas and complicated issues. Now the freedom struggle would be seen as a more intimate, human story with universal themes of love, tragic loss and the determined pursuit of justice. Justice denied.
Just over two months after Emmett’s killers were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury in the Mississippi Delta, Rosa Parks took her stand by keeping her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama, leading to the historic bus boycott there. Parks would say many years later that she was thinking about Emmett that day. Likewise, Coretta Scott King later said that the actions of Emmett’s mother and others who risked their lives testifying in the murder trial inspired those in Montgomery to maintain the year-long boycott, which would propel the mass movement of civil disobedience, and a new national leader – the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
So, there you have it. Emmett Till and the theory of everything. Bang.
Till’s murder was not an isolated event, but part of a long history of African-American lynchings and other killings that did not get the same attention. Besides the historical timing, what made this case different?
Clearly, Emmett’s age made him stand out among the more than 5,000 reported lynching victims over eight decades between Reconstruction and the 1950s. And, of course, the brutality of it all horrified people. Emmett had been tortured over the course of several hours before his body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River with a 75-pound gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. The photograph of his mutilated remains in Jet magazine caused a shock wave.
This was not the usual and expected response. A lynching is a power tool aimed at enforcing social structure, and reinforcing the degradation of the “other.” Often, the families of victims would bury their dead in shame and fade quietly into the landscape of oppression. Historically, in cases of the spectacle lynching, the white perpetrators would document their atrocities with photographs as evidence of their dominance, their power over the black body. The photos were used as trophy and warning.
This case broke with that pattern, largely because Emmett’s mother and those who rallied around her took ownership of the narrative. They flipped the script. They took control of the images as an act of empowerment, rather than degradation. The photos formed the text of a new narrative, challenging people to action. In a rite of passage for a generation of young African-Americans, his story became their story. In fact, I’ve heard a number of activist scholars say that they became involved in the movement because of Emmett Till – the one victim of more than 5,000, whose name everyone remembered.
What does the story of Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, tell us about the role of ordinary people in the civil rights struggle?
We tend to see the movement as characterized by its leaders – mostly King. “Mother Mobley” shows the great sacrifices made by so many others – the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement. She is everymother, an ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
She didn’t sink into despair, hatred, bitterness. She mined her grief for a mission in life and spent the last six months of her life working with me on her book, to make sure the story and its important meaning would outlive her. She wanted to share with everyone the points she made with kids in the Chicago public schools: that we all have a unique purpose in life. She helped her students lock onto their purpose and see some value in their lives. “Freedom is never free,” she liked to say.
Why might the Emmett Till story be resonating today?
Before Trayvon Martin, before Michael Brown, before Tamir Rice, there was Emmett Till. This was the first “Black Lives Matter” story. It is no wonder, then, that each time we read about another young unarmed black male being shot down in the street – unjustly – by an authority figure, there is the mention of Emmett’s name. What we come to see with the loss of Emmett is just what racism has cost us in this country. What it costs us still, in the loss of so many bright, gifted kids. Partly through untimely deaths. But also in the limited opportunities many have to excel, because of mass incarceration or even unwarranted tracking in schools.
When we begin to see the Emmett Till story in this context, we realize that we all lose something to racism. And we see that we all have something to gain by overcoming the obstacles to full participation that still exist. So, Emmett Till is a vital American story.