The Associated Press reported this month that the FBI has reopened the Emmett Till case.
Till was a 14-year-old Chicago boy who went to Mississippi in the summer of 1955 to visit family. In the tiny Delta town of Money, he allegedly whistled at a white woman or made suggestive remarks to her or touched her — the stories kept changing.
Her husband, brother-in-law and probably others beat Till, shot him, weighted his body down and threw it in the Tallahatchie River. An all-white jury found them not guilty. Then, for a few thousand dollars, the murderers confessed their crime to Look magazine.
Six decades later, Till’s accuser, a young woman named Carolyn Bryant, told historian Timothy Tyson, “nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.” It was a partial admission that she lied back in 1955 and kept lying. Anyone who studied the episode knew that already.
It was probably her confession that prompted the FBI to reopen the case. Actually, the Feds re-reopened it because they first investigated halfheartedly in 1955, then quite thoroughly between 2004 and 2007.
What more might we learn from a new Till investigation? We already have the names of his primary tormentors, the long-dead J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant. A few of their kin were also involved; it would be good to know precisely what they did, to call out the guilty. Emmett Till’s family deserves the fullest answers possible.
Still, there probably is not a whole lot to learn that we don’t already know. The last investigation produced a 10,000-page dossier, yet a race- and gender-balanced grand jury sitting in Greenwood, Miss., refused to indict anyone back in 2007. Memories fade, witnesses disappear, suspects die.
Some have suggested that reopening the case is a cynical ploy by the Justice Department to deflect criticism for its horrific recent treatment of refugee families, separating babies from mothers, creating tent cities. I don’t doubt it; certainly the Trump administration has given us every reason to expect the worst.
But that doesn’t explain why we’re still interested in Emmett Till. Why do we care? Maybe we need to feel that his suffering meant something, that beyond the brutality lies some kind of redemption.
Till has become an icon. Two years ago, at the opening of the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington, Oprah Winfrey said the Till room was the most moving thing she saw there. Sacred, she called it — a memorial designed to look like the very church where Till was waked in Chicago back in 1955.
Last year, when someone scrawled a racial slur on the front gate of LeBron James’ home, he called a news conference and said that the first thing he thought of was Emmett Till’s mother Mamie, how she refused to keep silent in the face of racism. At the end of 2017, comedian Dave Chappell ended his HBO special with a homily about Till. Two months ago, Bill Cosby’s wife Camille invoked Till’s name and (falsely, strangely) compared her husband’s situation to a lynching.
More than any time since 1955, Emmett Till is everywhere. As the roll call of unarmed young black men killed by police rolled in over the past few years, article after article invoked his name, and on the internet, Photoshopped pictures depicted him side by side with each new martyr of the Black Lives Matter movement. His ruined face has become shorthand for American bigotry, the logical extreme of our racial history.
Till is to America what Anne Frank is to Germany, a child martyr to a national evil. His torture and murder symbolize the regime that brutalized his people for decades. Like Anne Frank, he was an innocent, destroyed by “adult” hatreds and institutions.
It is fitting that we remember Emmett Till, but in our retellings, I worry that we cheapen his story. The Till murder “staggered the nation” back in 1955, declared The New York Times in its story about the FBI reopening the case; “the boy’s open-coffin funeral and the publication of photographs of his mutilated body, has never faded away …” The Washington Post and CNN agreed, remarking on the power of those pictures to change history, to launch the civil rights movement.
At his funeral, Till’s mother famously said, “Let the people see what they did to my boy,” then opened his casket so that 200,000 mourners on Chicago’s South Side could face the horror directly. She allowed a photographer to take pictures of her son in his coffin, pictures that black America saw in Jet magazine and in the Chicago Defender.
But it isn’t true that those photographs spread across America or around the world, causing the scales to fall from white eyes. African-Americans saw them, and the pictures gave grim determination to what has been called “The Emmett Till generation” of the civil rights movement, black activists like Anne Moody, John Lewis, Muhammad Ali. They all wrote about Till in their memoirs.
But no mainstream newspaper or magazine reprinted the photos, and they were far too gruesome for early television. Very, very few white people ever saw them before 1987, when the documentary “Eyes on the Prize” gave Emmett Till several minutes and included the funeral photos from 1955.
The Till story did not start the civil rights movement, though it was part of a long continuum for African-Americans, an important episode in a much longer struggle that went back decades and goes on today. Nor was it white America’s righteous moment of awakening.
It would be nice to think that one boy’s suffering and his mother’s courage redeemed us. But change didn’t happen that way back then, and it won’t happen that way in the future.
We must understand what the Emmett Till generation understood, staring at those horrifying photos in 1955: that change is hard, long, brutal, and not at all inevitable.
Elliott J. Gorn teaches history at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of the forthcoming “Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till.”
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