Emmett Till

The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement

Devery S. Anderson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781496802859
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement offers the first, and as of 2018, only comprehensive account of the 1955 murder, the trial, and the 2004-2007 FBI investigation into the case and Mississippi grand jury decision. By all accounts, it is the definitive account of the case. It tells the story of Emmett Till, the fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago brutally lynched for a harmless flirtation at a country store in the Mississippi Delta. Anderson utilizes documents that had never been available to previous researchers, such as the trial transcript, long-hidden depositions by key players in the case, and interviews given by Carolyn Bryant to the FBI in 2004 (her first in fifty years), as well as other recently revealed FBI documents. Anderson also interviewed family members of the accused killers, most of whom agreed to talk for the first time, as well as several journalists who covered the murder trial in 1955. Till's murder and the acquittal of his killers by an all-white jury set off a firestorm of protests that reverberated all over the world and spurred on the civil rights movement. Like no other event in modern history, the death of Emmett Till provoked people all over the United States to seek social change. Anderson's exhaustively researched book was also the basis for the ABC miniseries Women of the Movement, which was written/executive-produced by Marissa Jo Cerar; directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, Tina Mabry, Julie Dash, and Kasi Lemmons; and executive-produced by Jay-Z, Jay Brown, Tyran "Ty Ty" Smith, Will Smith, James Lassiter, Aaron Kaplan, Dana Honor, Michael Lohmann, Rosanna Grace, Alex Foster, John Powers Middleton, and David Clark. For over six decades the Till story has continued to haunt the South as the lingering injustice of Till's murder and the aftermath altered many lives. Fifty years after the murder, renewed interest in the case led the Justice Department to open an investigation into identifying and possibly prosecuting accomplices of the two men originally tried. Between 2004 and 2005, the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducted the first real probe into the killing and turned up important information that had been lost for decades. Anderson covers the events that led up to this probe in great detail, as well as the investigation itself. This book will stand as the definitive work on Emmett Till for years to come. Incorporating much new information, the book demonstrates how the Emmett Till murder exemplifies the Jim Crow South at its nadir. The author accessed a wealth of new evidence. Anderson made a dozen trips to Mississippi and Chicago over a ten-year period to conduct research and interview witnesses and reporters who covered the trial. In Emmett Till, Anderson corrects the historical record and presents this critical saga in its entirety.

PART ONE

In Black and White

1

Mother and Son

For a few dark and confused hours before the sun rose on August 28, 1955, a fourteen-year-old black teenager visiting Mississippi knew he was hated. Shortly after daylight, as he slipped into unconsciousness, surrounded by white men mercilessly beating him to death, he was more hated than anyone on earth.

That boy, Emmett Till, lost his life tragically in the Mississippi Delta that Sunday morning only because his story began there generations earlier. Although the brash African American youth from Chicago knew little of the region where his life would end, family ties to the South had brought about his fateful visit in the first place. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Elizabeth Carthan, had been born near Webb, in Mississippi’s Tallahatchie County, on November 23, 1921. Webb is located two miles south of Sumner, one of two seats in the county where Mamie would attend a murder trial nearly thirty-four years later.

Tallahatchie, a Choctaw word meaning “rock of waters,” is the name of the river that runs in a southwesterly direction at a length of over 300 miles, rising in Tippah County. It joins the Coldwater, Yalobusha, and Greenwood Rivers and forms the Yazoo in Leflore County. Native American influences notwithstanding, white-black relationships came to characterize the state of Mississippi and laid the foundation for later conflicts. By 1832, one year before the state legislature officially formed Tallahatchie County, white settlers had already come with their slaves.¹ In 1860, over 436,000 African American men, women, and children—or 55 percent of the state’s population—were living and working as chattel on plantations and cotton fields throughout Mississippi. The total number of slaves in the South at the start of the Civil War was just under four million.²

Memory of life in the Magnolia State would elude Mamie. The only child of Wiley Nash and Alma Smith Carthan, Mamie was just two years old when her family said good-bye to Mississippi and moved north to Summit, Illinois. Summit, more commonly called Argo, is a small suburb on the south side of Chicago, incorporated in 1890. Only six black families had settled there by 1922.³ The Carthans’ arrival two years later was part of what came to be termed the Great Migration, a movement that had already inspired thousands of black families to leave the South and seek a new beginning in northern cities. The migration had begun shortly before World War I, and between 1915 and 1918, 450,000 to 500,000 blacks left their southern homes. Northern destinations were usually determined by the starting point of the migrants. Blacks from southern coastal states generally settled in their northern counterparts, such as New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and as far inland as Pennsylvania. Mississippians and those from immediately neighboring states most often boarded a train on the Illinois Central Railroad with Chicago as their destination.⁴

Economic difficulties that followed the war continued to produce staggering migratory figures. During the 1920s, when the Carthans left Mississippi, over 700,000 southern blacks did the same, often with little more than a few possessions and a dream of what the North could do for them and their families. Poignantly, the migration was often couched in religious terms familiar to the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which blacks saw themselves as a chosen people. Theirs was a story that mirrored the ancient Israelites, who triumphed over bondage and persecution by escaping Egypt and finding renewal in the land of Canaan. Such comparisons stimulated an abundance of black optimism, despite the fact that for most of the migrating families, uncertainties about starting over economically were inevitable.⁵

Chicago was especially attractive to African Americans seeking refuge from the oppressive conditions of the South. In the North, they found jobs in a variety of industries. In the early 1920s, the largest employers of blacks were the Armour and Morris stockyards, where a combined total of 3,500 labored. In Argo, African Americans working at Corn Products Refining Company numbered 500.⁶

Although Chicago offered much to blacks who were long accustomed to a repressive life in the South, it was not Utopia. For fifty years prior to the migration, neither whites nor blacks living in Chicago cared much for each other, but any difficulties that the black population endured as a result were still a vast improvement over the institutionalized racism that had been a daily fact of life in the South.⁷ As Chicago’s black population grew, however, so did white antagonism. This culminated in 1919 in a race riot rooted in job competition in the post–World War I era. The riot began on July 27, when Eugene Williams, a black teenager, swam across an imaginary line on a segregated beach. People on the white side of the beach began throwing rocks, and in the fracas, Williams drowned. Rather than arrest the white man believed responsible for Williams’s death, police instead arrested a black man. When blacks protested, whites responded with violence. Fighting erupted on both sides and lasted until August 3. Thirty-eight people died and hundreds more were injured before the uprising was finally quelled.⁸

Five years later, Nash Carthan left Mississippi and sent for his family after a few months. Upon his arrival in Argo, he found work at Corn Products, where most black men in that community aspired to work.⁹ The plant also drew several white men at the time, and by 1930, of the 700 workers in the village, nearly half, including Nash, were employed in the refinery industry.¹⁰ Established in 1907, Corn Products was ideally located because Chicago, with its abundant water supply and transportation capabilities, was positioned at the center of the midwestern states, where the majority of US corn is grown.¹¹

Mamie’s childhood was shaped largely by the influence of her mother. Deeply religious, Alma was also excessively strict and monitored her daughter’s every move. This continued even as Mamie grew into adulthood. Alma and Nash separated when Mamie was around eleven, and Nash lost contact with his daughter for over fifteen years. He later remarried and moved to Detroit, while Alma, who stayed behind in Argo, married a man named Tom Gaines in March 1933. Through Alma’s dominance, Mamie remained well disciplined in her studies, but was sheltered socially.¹² For her naïveté, she would eventually pay a price.

Because Argo’s black population remained relatively small, Mamie attended predominantly white schools. Yet her interaction with students and teachers was mostly positive. “It hadn’t occurred to me that I was darker than some of the other people that were in the class,” she said, reflecting back on her youth. “I was graded strictly according to my ability to perform and I was never looked down on.”¹³ She certainly had ample opportunity to develop healthy interracial relationships early on. For instance, Alma played a motherly role to several children in the neighborhood, many of whom were white. After Mamie developed a minor heart condition when she was about twelve years old, she was regularly assisted by a white girl whom Mamie lovingly called her “shadow.” This friend accompanied Mamie to school and back, watched over her, and made sure she did not exert herself by climbing steps.¹⁴

Several white European immigrants also lived in the Carthans’ neighborhood. One door down from their house on Sixty-Fourth Street lived John and Mary Nyezprook, from Russia. Two doors up was the home of Stanley and Alvina Lapinski; Stanley was from Poland, while Alvina hailed from Germany. The men in these families also worked at Corn Products.¹⁵ It is not known how well the Carthans knew these neighbors, but some level of interaction in such a tight-knit community can be assumed. Although antagonism often existed in Chicago between blacks and European immigrants as each competed for jobs, for the most part, Argo was able to avoid such conflicts. As an adult, Mamie proudly declared that some of her best friends were white.¹⁶

Chicago did see its share of discrimination, but unlike the South, it remained de facto, and in fact, illegal. Following the 1919 race riot, a local alderman proposed segregating the city, but the Governor’s Commission on Race Relations countered “that measures involving or approaching deportation or segregation are illegal, impracticable and would not solve, but would accentuate, the race problem and postpone its just and orderly solution by the process of adjustment.”¹⁷ However, as Chicago’s black population increased from 44,000 to 492,000 between 1920 and 1950, many worried merchants responded by excluding blacks outright or by resorting to dishonest strategies to keep them away. To discourage blacks from patronizing a restaurant, for example, employees would ignore them, oversalt their food, treat them rudely, or overcharge them. Blacks endured similar treatment in hotels and theaters. Some resisted this breach of the civil rights law with violence, while others sued. Between 1930 and 1940, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) secured judgments of $7,000 against Chicago restaurants alone.¹⁸

An episode between Mamie and her high school geometry teacher, Miss Moore, apparently was race-related. Moore was not fond of her black students and gave Mamie a failing grade on an assignment that Mamie had completed, but which had been stolen by some boys before she could turn it in. Although the school principal ordered Moore to restore the A grade after Mamie objected, Moore took occasion for revenge when Mamie tried to fulfill the requirements for the National Honor Society. Moore, who was on the board of the society, was also the swimming instructor at Argo Community High and informed Mamie that swimming was a requirement in order to qualify. When Mamie hesitated to get into the water, Moore shoved her in. Terrified, Mamie lost consciousness and began to sink, but was rescued in time by her friend Ollie Colbert. “All the while, Miss Moore stood there laughing,” said Mamie several years later. “I’ll never forget her as long as I live.”¹⁹

Although this incident ended Mamie’s dreams of the National Honor Society, she made the honor roll and claimed to be the first black student at Argo Community High to graduate at the top of her class. This was an accomplishment in itself, but for a black girl at the time, so was graduating at all. Only a few black students had ever received a diploma at Argo before Mamie; most of the girls dropped out in order to marry. Mamie, who had never even dated, felt like romance had already eluded her because at age eighteen, she was still single.²⁰ Yet her social inexperience created a challenge of its own, and for that, she spent the next decade making mistakes that would teach her valuable lessons for the future. Because dating and dancing had always been denied her, she was left vulnerable by the time she was a young adult and ready for both. When she met Louis Till, a man three months younger and nine inches taller than her own five-foot frame, she was impressed by his sophistication and confidence. Louis, a part-time boxer and skilled gambler, had been born in Missouri and orphaned as a child. He had recently moved to Argo to work at Corn Products.²¹

For their first date, Mamie and Louis went to Berg’s Drug Store, an Argo shop that served, but refused to seat, black customers. They bought banana splits, but instead of taking them out, Louis insisted on eating them there. Mamie nervously went along with Louis on this one, and watched him stand up to store owner Berg, even though Berg threatened to tell Alma what the young couple had done. Mamie admired the Louis Till she saw that night—brave, protective, and standing his ground.²² Yet Mamie’s innocence, contrasted against Louis’s worldliness and street smarts, created a dysfunctional relationship from the beginning. “He treated me like I was a little girl and took me for granted like a doll you would set on a shelf and find it there when you came back.” Alma saw little that she admired in Louis and persuaded Mamie to break up with him. Later, Louis saw Mamie out with another boy and created such a scene in front of her house that Alma came out and scolded them both. Alma’s actions may have finally backfired. “I flared up,” declared Mamie, “that I was grown up and wasn’t a child anymore. It was then, I guess, that I made up my mind I was going to marry L...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Preface
• Prologue: Through a Glass, Darkly
• Part One: In Black and White
• Part Two: In Living Color
• Epilogue: Seeing Clearly
• Appendix: Piecing the Puzzle
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index