Emmett Till was a loving 14-year-old son of a single mom who was lynched during a friendly visit to some cousins in Mississippi. Emmett was born in Chicago in 1941. His mother, Mamie Till-Bradley, was born in Webb, Mississippi, and her family moved her to Illinois in 1923 during what was called the Great Migration, an exodus of blacks from the South. According to the movie, Till, his mom raised him to have no fear of whites, but she was afraid of him making this trip with his uncle and cousin. The whites of Mississippi didn't act like those in Chicago. What if he didn't say 'yes sir' enough or looked at a white woman the wrong way? He assured her he understood, but he was all of 14, where a boy's libido often outpaces his maturity.
My new project is this same period of time as transcriber of the oral Beloit Migration Project. I transcribed the stories of 14 old residents interviewed back in 1976, who were recruited from Pontotoc, Mississippi to work in Beloit, Wisconsin, not far from Chicago. Many of them came through Chicago to get here, and some stayed there instead. I checked each one to see if any of them had responses to this boy's murder in 1955 and found nothing. The first sign of protests for any of them was a later reaction to Martin Luther King.
Mamie had an open casket funeral in Chicago to show the world what they'd done to her son, and neither man was convicted in trial by white-man jury down there. But this event kick-started what was already simmering, a civil rights movement, and Mamie was an early outspoken leader. Because of Till's death, Rosa Park refused to move to the back of the bus. She was subsequently arrested for violating Alabama civil laws, and the NAACP decided that this case needed national-wide attention. This led to bus boycotts, and a federal lawsuit ruling that this segregation violated the 14th Amendment.
The 1987 Eyes on the Prize, a 14-hour Emmy award-winning documentary, began with the murder of Emmett Till. Accompanying written materials for the series, Eyes on the Prize and Voices of Freedom (for the second time period), exhaustively explore the major figures and events of the Civil Rights Movement. Stephen Whitaker states that, as a result of the attention Till's death and the trial received,
Mississippi became in the eyes of the nation the epitome of racism and the citadel of white supremacy. From this time on, the slightest racial incident anywhere in the state was spotlighted and magnified. To the Negro race throughout the South and to some extent in other parts of the country, this verdict indicated an end to the system of 'noblesse oblige.' The faith in the white power structure waned rapidly. Negro faith in legalism declined, and the revolt officially began on December 1, 1955, with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott.[40]
Here's what I learned at one of the links I used:
"Although the modern civil rights movement was well underway before Emmett Till's murder, Mamie Bradley's refusal to let that crime be covered up brought renewed urgency and resolution to the movement. With Mamie Bradley by his side, Randolph proposed a march on Washington to demand action from the federal government to protect black citizens from the kind of violence that had taken Till's life. Such a march did take place, as did several others, eventually culminating in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom where the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Passage of the Civil Rights Act soon followed."
A. Philip Randolph is one of the leaders I discovered while writing "From Lincoln to Trump." He organized a March on Washington in 1941 to demand that FDR provide equal treatment in employment. All FDR could do to prevent the march was to bar discrimination in businesses that held federal contracts. It was a start. Randolph also organized the march in 1963 where Martin Luther King gave his "I have a dream" speech, a march organized for both freedom and opportunity. This was held the year after the US Supreme Court demanded that the University of Mississippi open its doors to its first black college student, James Meredith.
The book I'm working on, "20th Century Black Experiences: A Beloit Case Study" will cover their responses to issues such as why the migration happened, and all the responses raised before the 1965 Civil Rights Act, and continue to the reality of 1976 and why Emmett Till was no longer being remembered in those communities as the pivotal act that awakened a nation.
Till is the name of a recent movie depicting Till's mother's journey for justice for her son. Her voice became the voice of the Civil Rights movement and yet King's name is the one we think of first. King's name is the one first mentioned by the black Beloit respondents as informing their desire to resist racism in their area, bringing it to the forefront of their minds, too. Not Till's murder.
What do they remember of that period of time that led up to the killing of Emmett Till? What was the reality of the black migration in the first half of the 1950s that made Mamie Bradley afraid to send her son back to Mississippi? Why, in Chicago, did she raise her son to have no fear of whites? These are many things my full book project will explore.
Chicago was both boom and bust to these 14 respondents, two of which were white. Here are some of their comments about Chicago memories:
"I know once he got laid off and he went in to Chicago. These brothers had him to come into Chicago. They were going to try to get him a job there. And my mother went over there and she said no, I'm never moving to Chicago. I'll never take my children to Chicago. I don't know whether it was the crowd or the apartments, and she just wasn't used to no city like Chicago. That was, of course, in 1921 or '22."
Mamie's family, too, settled in a small town outside of Chicago, and she then moved and raised her son in Argo, Illinois.
"Said they used to tell some very tough stories about Chicago. Get up there and they tell it to you, and in fact, the average black man didn't want to come to Chicago. They say, well, sir, you get up there, you're liable to fall on a pit, they drop you down there and make medicine out of you."
There was a paper they referred to called the Chicago Defender that many of them subscribed to. For the book, I'll find out more about it. I'll also want to check the newspapers in this area to see what kind of reporting was done on Till's murder here. Is it possible they thought he brought it on himself? Here's some comments that indicate that possibility:
"always use your manners, boy. It'll carry you a long ways." I can remember him saying those things to me. He said, "It don't hurt to say yes and no sir." He says, even to the other ones, because he said someday they'll be saying that back to you. And you'll be liking it. So he said, and so that was impressed upon me there. So I still to this day still hear that answer, yes sir and no sir, don't hurt you."
"Said it even more, in other words, the whites didn't want the blacks to come north … they wanted them down on that farm. To work those fields … because later on, when I went back to Mississippi – I believe it was 1937, the job that the Negroes was doing when I left from down there, such as grading the roads and building the good roads and getting around there. When I went back there in 1937 the white men were doing those jobs."
We can guess even in 1955 there was a lot of resentment in the South toward blacks who were living better in the North. Emmett's only real crime had been to call a white woman fine looking. He never even touched her, but she got offended and she let her white men know about it.
"But you see, the main thing in the south, especially around in the State of Mississippi or Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama, Georgia, they're getting down there, although the Negro had been set free, as far as slavery was concerned. But he was governed. First of all, they wouldn't give you a job that you'd make anything, you know. You didn't have a decent house to live in."
But even in the north they faced continuing racism:
"Well, because a black man was qualified to do the job, and yet they wouldn't put him on it."
"But you ask in Mississippi they say you go to the back door, you get it, you get served. They serve you at the back door, give you all you want to eat. But they didn't tell you nothing in Beloit. They just said we don't serve you. That's all."
"You just couldn't get anything. You go to a restaurant, you couldn't, they said we don't serve colored people."
And yet they decided to recruit workers like yourself from Mississippi. Do you know why?
"Cheap labor. Cheap labor."