American History Tellers - Remembering Emmett Till | 7

Episode Date: August 28, 2019

The murder of Emmett Till galvanized the nascent civil rights movement. But the full story of what happened in Money, Miss., on August 28, 1955, is significantly different than the narrative that emerged at the time. A new app developed by scholars at Florida State University now seeks to give a fuller picture of Till’s lynching by taking users on a GPS guided tour around the Mississippi Delta and the important sites related to the case. Davis Houck, a professor of rhetorical studies at FSU, developed the app, and he joins us to talk about educating people on the legacy of Till’s killing and why it's more significant than ever.Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge new seasons of American History Tellers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Imagine it's August 28th, 1963, and you are in the nation's capital. You are joined by 250,000 people here on this day to be a part of history. You're used to crowds. You happen to be a professional basketball player. But this is something else. You had no idea it would be this big of an event when, on a whim, you borrowed a car and drove to D.C. last night.

When you arrived, you got out and walked around, picked out the perfect spot from which to view the event. An organizer spotted you, sized you up, and then asked if you'd volunteer to help with security the next day. You said sure, and he told you to return at 9 a.m. And here it is, 9 a.m. the next morning. It's loud and hot, dense crowds on every side. The organizer from the night before shouts and waves you over. Young man, come here. Here, take this. This is your credential. Keep it on you at all times and put this on. The event organizer hands you a little white cap. We need all of our security people to wear these. Okay, head this way and we need you

by the podium. You've stepped into his dream. Dr. Martin Luther King approaches the microphone. You are mere feet behind him when he begins the speech. He speaks of the path of racial justice and the fierce urgency of now. Suddenly, in the crowd, a woman shouts, Tell them about the dream, Martin. King gazes forward, the notes in his hand seemingly forgotten. Whatever he's about to say, he didn't write it down. He knows this part.

He feels this part. He tells everyone, all 250,000 of them, that he has a dream. When the speech ends, the response from the crowd overwhelms you. King steps away from the microphone, and a nearby man commends him on another great speech. But something inside tells you that this is not just another great speech. Impulsively, you walk forward. You barely even comprehend what you're doing, but you know you must do it. You watch as King accepts more congratulations. You see he's holding the pages of the speech's script in his left hand. The words tumble out of you. Dr. King,

can I have that speech? King offers you a humble smile. He appears flattered that you would even ask. Without a word, he simply hands it over. Three sheets of paper, single space type. He's about to say something to you, but in an instant he's whisked away by another well-wisher. You stare down at the speech. It doesn't have a title, but you suspect it will soon. You will hold on to these pages for the rest of your life. In your heart, you know that today's words will never be forgotten, and that one day, Dr. King's dream will be realized. Have you ever wondered who created that bottle of sriracha that's living in your fridge?

Or why nearly every house in America has at least one game of Monopoly? Introducing The Best Idea Yet, a brand new podcast about the surprising origin stories of the products you're obsessed with. Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. Now streaming. Welcome to Buy It Now, where aspiring entrepreneurs get 90 seconds to pitch to an audience of potential customers. or wherever you get your podcasts. From Wondery, I'm Lindsey Graham, and this is American History Tellers, our history, your story. More than 250,000 people attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom 56 years ago today, August 28, 1963. that Martin Luther King delivered his iconic I Have a Dream speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where he looked out on the crowd to proclaim the event the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. One of the attendees that day was George Raveling, a former basketball player who by chance ended up working security at the March. Raveling was just

a few feet away from Dr. King during his speech, and after it was all over, King handed Raveling was just a few feet away from Dr. King during his speech, and after it was all over, King handed Raveling his original typewritten pages with a smile. George Raveling still owns those pages, and he says he has no intention of letting them go. King's speech is largely considered the marquee moment of the Civil Rights Movement and will forever be an integral part of United States history. But just eight years before that, on the very same day, another seminal moment in the civil rights movement occurred. It was the murder of Emmett Till. Till was a 14-year-old boy from Chicago who was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by two white men on August 28, 1955, while visiting family in Money, Mississippi. His killers were never brought

to justice, but his death galvanized the nascent civil rights movement. Our guest today is Davis Houck. He's a professor of rhetorical studies at Florida State University. This month, he launched an app called the Emmett Till Memory Project. It uses GPS, historical documents, and photos to illustrate a significant American tragedy, a tragedy that occurred on a date that changed the course of history not once, but twice. Here's our conversation. Davis Hauck, thank you for joining me on American History Tellers. Thanks for having me today.

Now, you were first interested in the story of Emmett Till when you were an undergraduate, and you've spent a fair portion of your career on it. It is obviously an important story and a turning point in the civil rights movement, but why is it important for you? Why have you dedicated so much of your time and career to it? When I was teaching here at Florida State back in 2003, I was teaching a race and rhetoric course, and we were reading a book called Local People by John Dittmer. And I made the mistake in the small seminar of asking my students if I could arrange a field trip to Mississippi, who would be interested in going? And everybody put their hands up. And at that point, I was sort of committed to doing this project. And I won't go into great detail, but we went, 10 of us. And one of the stops that we were able to negotiate with the

folks doing the tour was the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market, which was just a husk, just a shell of a building in Money, Mississippi, but it's still there. And being that close to ground zero of civil rights history was moving to all of us. That was 2003. And at that point, I was just curious to know more. I had heard the big, broad contour story of Emmett Till, but I didn't know the particulars. And so seeing that store up close elicited my curiosity. And that began a pretty active investigation into the case. Where I spent a lot of time initially, Lindsay, was at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. I was very interested to see how the Mississippi press, the white press in Mississippi reacted to the kidnapping and murder. And so in

Jackson, there's a great archive there with all the newspaper coverage. And that was the jumping off point for my first major project on the Till case called Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press. Well, you mentioned the Bryant store as a kind of nexus for your interest in this episode. Of course, that's the store run by Roy Bryant, who with his brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, were the instigators of this event. Can you tell us a little bit about them and their trial? Sure. Yeah, so Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were initially arrested. Roy Bryant was arrested on August 28th, not long after they had murdered Emmett Till. The body had not turned up yet, and J.W. Milam was arrested the following

day, August 29th. They were both initially arrested on kidnapping charges because, like I said, the body had not turned up. On August 31st, they find a body in the Tallahatchie River, and it's so decomposed and hideously deformed that the only way Moses Wright, Emmett Till's great uncle, could identify the corpse was through a ring on his finger. At that point, the body was shipped back to Chicago. The charges were upgraded to murder. A grand jury issued indictments for murder on September 6th. Shockingly, because justice does not work this way now, the trial was held on September 19th. It lasted five days. And on September 23rd, in just a little over an hour of deliberations, the jury acquitted Milam and Bryant.

In terms of who testified for the prosecution, Moses Wright testified. Again, Emmett's great uncle. And there's an iconic picture that was kind of – the picture was not supposed to be taken, but one of the black photographers in the courtroom snuck a picture, and it's where Moses Wright stands up and points at J.W. Milam when his attorney asks him, you know, who had come to his house on the 28th to take Emmett out of it. There were several people who testified for the prosecution, including Mamie Till, Emmett's mom, who was able to identify that, yes, this corpse was her son. The defense put on a very, very brief defense. The two men never testified, of course. Carolyn Bryant did testify, but her testimony was not allowed to be heard by the jurors. But one of the key people to testify on the defense's half was the Tallahatchie County Sheriff by the name of Clarence Strider. And Strider testified under oath that the body that had come out of the

Tallahatchie River had been in that river at least two weeks, maybe longer, and he couldn't even tell. It was so decomposed that he couldn't even tell the race of the person. Of course, if you go back to the newspaper accounts as I did, the day the body was discovered, he was there on the riverbanks, and he claimed at that point that the body looked like it might have been in the river two or three days. And so he had changed his testimony dramatically over the course of those two weeks, and he was testifying on the defense's behalf. Well, false accounts are perhaps the heart of this story, because just after that trial, Bryant and Milam's story was reported in Look magazine, and that's pretty much the basis of America's understanding of the event at the time. But what was the fact and fiction in that account? Well, this gets to the crux of the matter because William Bradford Huey, who was a very famous journalist at the time, paid Milam and Bryant a little over $3,000. Their attorneys also got some money

to essentially confess what really happened. In order to do this story, and my colleague Dave Tell has done a marvelous job on tracking the story down through the Huey papers at Ohio State University, Huey was trying to make sure Look Magazine and himself were not going to get sued. And so they were trying to get all parties involved in this case to sign releases, essentially granting him permissions to tell the story and they weren't going to sue him for liable or whatever. And as it turns out, Huey was only able to get a couple of releases, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam most notably. And so what we ended up getting, Huey ends up telling this fabulous tale from primarily J.W. Milam's point of view of this incredibly boastful Emmett Till

who stands up to them and is unafraid of them. And up till the time that J.W. Milam supposedly shoots him on the bank of the Tallahatchie River, you know, we have a boastful Emmett Till bragging about being with white women and sex with white women. It's all a bunch of lies, and we know it's a bunch of lies now. But this hit the newsstands in Look Magazine, huge circulation magazine, in January 1956. And immediately, it is the most story talked about for weeks in our country. And a lot of people in Mississippi in particular,

a lot of white people in Mississippi in particular, grew up with this version of the story, the version of the story that has Emmett Till being, for all intents and purposes, a rapist. And was it simply that this was a mainstream publication with a large, mostly white audience, that this is the story that persisted rather than perhaps the truer one? Exactly. And there was a mainstream publication with a large, mostly white audience, that this is the story that persisted rather than perhaps the truer one? Exactly. And there was a counter story. And we

know now that that story was largely true, told by James Hicks and other black journalists who had investigated the case more carefully and told a vastly different story. But it was a story that white America simply didn't hear because James Hicks was writing for black publications, the Baltimore Afro-American, the Cleveland Callen Post, the famous post-mortem of Till as shown in Jet Magazine. And so there was a small contingent of black press in Sumner, Mississippi, gathered there for the trial. And what's so interesting is right smack in the middle of the trial, the black press largely, and James Hicks does a marvelous job telling the story, they, in the middle of the night, go find five witnesses to the actual beating of Emmett Till. And so the white press didn't touch the story.

They didn't really tell the story. The Huey supposed confession, and because it was marketed as a confession, so many people took it as the truth. And again, it simply wasn't. It was a series of lies to protect J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant's friends from further prosecution. But the people who really got the story almost dead on was the black press. Well, let's take a moment then and run through a condensed version of the real story. What happened on that day, August 28th? On August 28th, Emmett and his cousins, let's back up to the 27th, which was a Saturday, they had gone into Greenwood and had a night of fun as a group of cousins on summer break would do. They drive back late Saturday

night going Sunday morning back to the Wright residence, which is about 12 miles north of Greenwood in Money. And they get back to the Wright residence, go to bed. And Moses Wright testifies that at about 2 or 2.30, he hears two men at the door asking for the boy who had done the talking down at Money. And at that point, the two men walk into the house. Wright did not invite them into the house. They just kind of burst into the house with their 45 handguns and flashlights and start going from room to room. And eventually, they find Emmett, and they pull him out of bed, and he gets dressed. And as they're leaving, and Elizabeth Wright, Moses Wright's wife, is begging the men, if you need money, we'll pay you money. Please don't take him. They know what incredible danger Emmett is in at this point. And as they leave the house, J.W. Milam turns to Moses Wright and says something to the effect of Preacher,

if you want to, he asks him how old he is, and Preacher says 64. And he says, well, if you want to see, if you want to make it to 65, you're not going to tell anybody about what we're doing here. Off they go. They get into, we're not sure if it's a car or a truck, and Moses Wright testifies at the trial later that he heard somebody say, is this the boy? And Moses Wright testifies, and I think these are exactly his words, in a voice lighter than a man's, the person says, yes, that's him. Is that Carolyn Bryant? That's the speculation because she could ID the boy. She could ID, she could identify Emmett.

And off they went back towards money with the lights off. And that's the last point at which Moses Wright saw his great nephew. What's interesting to me as a historian of the case, because we really just don't know, and I don't know that we ever will know, this was about 2.30 in the morning on Sunday, August 28th. The next eyewitness that we have seen the men and Emmett Till is about 6 or 6.30 in the morning on Sunday, August 28th. The next eyewitness that we have seen the men in Emmett Till is about 6 or 6.30 in the morning, 40 miles away, just outside the town of Drew, Mississippi. And we know this is good testimony because Willie Reed actually testified at the trial and would testify to his dying day that he had seen Emmett Till on the back of a pickup truck with two or three black men holding him in the back of this pickup truck

with several white men driving the pickup truck, including J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant. And they were going to a Sturdivant, the plantation was called the Sturdivant Plantation, owned by the Sturdivant family. And the reason they were out there was because they had a half-brother by the name of Leslie Milam who managed that plantation. And so they clearly wanted to beat and torture and eventually kill Emmett Till

away from a crowd. They didn't want to draw attention to themselves. And Willie Reed just happened to be walking down the street that early that Sunday morning when he saw this green and white Chevy pickup truck with Emmett Till in the back of it. And later, he heard the beating. The beating happened in a small seed barn on this plantation. And he told some other people about it because several people heard this awful beating happening in the shed. Later, he saw a pickup truck back up to the shed and probably at that point put in Emmett's body over a tarp. And this is probably about seven o'clock, so the sun is up and they got to do something with this

body. And so again, for me as a historian, I'm interested in, okay, from 2.30, the time they took Emmett from money until about 6 or 6.30 up near Drew, what was happening in those three or four hours, what was going on. And the best we can guess is that Milam and Bryant were getting together their people. They were going to make something of an event out of this. And it took a while for that to unfold, pre-cell phone, pre-I don't even think the Bryants had a phone in the store. But it's one of the mysteries still that we just don't know and the awful terror that Emmett no doubt experienced in those four hours because he probably knew at that point that his life was in grave danger. This is the emergency broadcast system.

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get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wondery app. You mentioned that the moment Till was taken by these men, that everyone knew what grave danger he was in. And in fact, of course, the reason they knew was that the possibility of violence like this was not uncommon. Many, many African-American men had been murdered by white supremacists before. But what about Till's murder pushed civil rights leaders to act? Well, there was a couple of things. I think one is, you know, Emmett was a child. He was 14. Perhaps more importantly, he was from Chicago, and his mother had friends and family who were pretty well connected with the NAACP in Chicago.

And it immediately became a story in the Chicago Defender, probably the nation's largest black newspaper. And so the story, unlike a lot of young Mississippi black men who mysteriously go missing, this one didn't happen quite that way because Emmett was not a Mississippi boy. He was from Chicago. And his mom immediately activated her network of people and people began writing about this case. So it went from a, and you can see it happen in the Mississippi press, it goes from being this very local story told in the Greenwood Commonwealth and other newspapers to quite literally exploding within a week after his body is discovered. One of the tripwires to make this story a national one occurred on September 1st, so literally the day

after the body is discovered. Roy Wilkins, who's the head of the NAACP nationally, comes out and all but accuses every Mississippian of being a child killer. And just this very inflammatory statement. And in hindsight, he shouldn't have said it. And, of course, the white Mississippi press took Wilkins' comments and ran with them. And at that case, you can see a pivot almost overnight in terms of how the press treated this case, especially in Mississippi. It went from being a case about, can you believe what these two white men did, to much more of a national focus, and let's watch and see how northern black people are coming to attack southern white people. So it becomes this big, big case about race immediately, and Roy Wilkins really was one of the people who ignited that case.

So Emmett Till's murder was the moment when the civil rights movement became the movement we know. It gained its momentum. Why is that? So there's a couple of explanations for this, and they're really, really interesting, Lindsay. The first is, so keep in mind when the Till case is happening, in August and September and November of 1955. On December 1st, a seamstress over in Montgomery, Alabama, refuses to give up her bus seat. And we know her, of course, as Rosa Parks. And Rosa Parks, many, many years later, not in 1955, not in 1965, but really into the 1990s,

she came out very publicly and said, when I stayed seated on that Montgomery bus, I was thinking of Emmett Till. And so what this did immediately was drew a pretty direct line from Emmett Till's kidnapping murder and the injustice from it directly to her act of resistance. And we know from her act of resistance, we can draw another straight line to the Montgomery bus boycott and a really direct line at that point to Dr. Martin Luther King. And so you see what's happening here. We're stitching together civil rights history. We're going directly from Money, Mississippi to Montgomery and the rise of Dr. King. And so that's a very powerful and compelling case that a lot of people are making about Emmett Till being the catalyst for the movement.

I would argue there's two other things going on here that don't get a lot of airtime and need some more airtime. But in 1960, in February of 1960, in Greensboro, North Carolina, we know that four freshmen from North Carolina A&T sat in at a Woolworths counter and were arrested. And shortly thereafter, this movement of 18 and 19 and 20-year-old black college kids across the Deep South, it just happened overnight. It was on college campuses and communities all over the Deep South of the sit-in movement. And what we tend to forget about this generation of 18 and 19 and 20-year-olds is they were Emmett's generation. They were 14 and 15 when Emmett was murdered, and their parents subscribed to Jet Magazine. And so what came out of this movement is the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It is formed literally in April of 1960 by Ella Baker. And a lot of SNCC kids would later say what got

me into the movement was seeing those horrific images of Emmett Till. There's a third sense in which Emmett Till, I think, could be argued as a catalyst for the movement. And it wasn't until recently that I heard this interview, but the main organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Greenwood, very close to Money, was a fellow by the name of Sam Block. And Joseph Sinsheimer, who was an undergraduate at Duke when these interviews were done back in the 80s, interviewed Block. And Block gives this fascinating interview where for the first time I heard that the reason he was able to organize Greenwood in 62 and 63 is people were still mad about the Till case. And SNCC moves its headquarters to Greenwood in the early 60s, such as the fervor there to organize.

And so I think from Rosa Parks, from the SNCC generation, which is really the Emmett Till generation, and locals in Greenwood wanting to organize because they're still angry about the Till case, I think that's how Emmett Till matters in terms of catalyzing what became the movement. There was another moment that proved pivotal, and that was Till's mother's decision to hold an open casket funeral, and then the photo that was published in Jet Magazine. What did this, her decision, do? Well, it immediately radicalized a generation of black parents and black children is what it did. Because a lot of people think, oh, that photo just circulated in Jet magazine.

And while Jet was kind of the premier publication of black America in 1955, it also ran in black newspapers around the country. My colleagues and I have collected a lot of these papers just to kind of see where did that photograph, and there's a couple of photographs, there's not just one, where did those gruesome photographs run? And they ran all the way from Washington, D.C., all the way out west to Los Angeles. White America did not see those photographs. To this day, and you can find them, of course, online, but white America did not grow up with those images of Emmett Till after they fished him out of the river.

And so what happened was blacks in Chicago lined up to bear witness. She not only let the black press come in and photograph the corpse, but she at that point said, I'm going to have an open casket funeral, and we're going to have two days, two full days of showing this body to whoever wants to see it. And so Chicago turned out for it. The estimates are upwards of 50 to 100,000 people, which is hard to imagine, but you see my point. Black Chicago turned out to look at this monstrosity that had come back from Mississippi. So tell me about your app. What are the places you highlight? What's the user experience? The way the app works is it's based on a map and there's 18 locations. And so you using your

smartphone are going to see these 18 sites and you can kind of customize the experience in terms of where you want to start. So let's say you want to start at the Bryant grocery store in Money. Where can you go from there that's nearby? Well, the app's going to tell you the closest place nearby is the Wright House, which is about three miles away. And then when you're at the Wright House, the place that's going to show up next is the church, which is just down the street where Moses Wright preached, but also where they were going to bury Emmett. And so what you're going to see on your phone is you're going to see some pictures, some recent pictures of the site, but you're also going to see some pictures from 1955. And then you're also, if you want to pull it up, you're going to get kind of a narrative experience of why this site is significant. And what we wanted to do was, so each site has about a 500 to 800 word essay

that kind of complicates things, that gives you the basic history, but we also didn't want to oversimplify. We wanted to kind of let viewers have their own experience and kind of say, okay, so historians say A, they say B, and they say C. We don't know exactly how this all played out, but the point is here are the different versions of history that we're going to support at this particular site. And in fact, here are the archival documents that Florida State University has in our Emmett Till archive that support these different interpretations. Here are some photographs of people involved in the case. We're trying to tell a complicated story. We're not trying to make this real simple. So I'm interested if you've heard from any users of the app

on their pilgrimage through the Emmett Till story. What is their emotional experience? Why are they drawn to this event in history? Yeah, Lindsay, we really haven't had the feedback yet because the app just went live not too long ago, literally weeks ago. So we really haven't had a lot of user experience with the app yet. But I can tell you, having been at these sites countless times over the years, it's just, especially let's start again back at the Bryant store, arguably you are at ground zero

of American civil rights history in this nowhere place in the middle of the Delta. And you are literally standing on the porch where Emmett stood and whistled at Carolyn Bryant. And then you're standing in the cemetery where Emmett's body was initially going to be buried. We can talk about that later, why he was going to be buried there and wasn't. So it's just the proximity to history. As my students have experienced it through the years, I took a class there in 2017, most recently, took 11 of my students to the Delta. And it's just a different experience. It's not reading a book. It's walking in Emmett's footsteps. It's walking in the killer's footsteps. It's seeing where the killers are buried. It's walking in the killer's footsteps. It's seeing where the killers are buried.

It's walking on a local plantation. It is wandering in the cemetery. It's, that proximity just changes the experience completely. Are you in trouble with the law? Need a lawyer who will fight like hell to keep you out of jail? We defend and we fight just like you'd want your own children defended. Whether you're facing a drug charge, caught up on a murder rap, accused of committing war crimes, look no further than Paul Bergeron.

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The body was so awfully decomposed that the family wanted Church of God in Christ to where, again, Moses Wright was a preacher up until 1949. There was a little cemetery there and a grave had been dug. They were going to have this service in the afternoon of the 31st, the same day his body came out of the river. And somehow, someway, Mamie Till got wind of this. And again, the communications were really, really hard because so many people in Mississippi simply didn't have a phone. But Crosby Smith, who was Moses Wright's brother-in-law and lived up in Sumner about 20 miles away, shows up with a deputy sheriff at kind of the last hour before the body's getting ready to be buried and says, this body is not being buried here in Money, Mississippi today. It's actually going north to Chicago. It's going home. And so Mamie Till was,

again, you know, many of her heroic acts, this was kind of one of the first ones, which is to say, no, no, no, I want to see that body. The body's coming back. And so Crosby Smith, who for me is one of the unspoken heroes of the case for what he did for the family. And as soon as Emmett was kidnapped at 2.30 in the morning, the first thing Moses Wright and Elizabeth Wright did was they drove up to Sumner to figure out with Crosby Smith what should they do. Should they go to the police? Because J.W. Milam has already threatened Moses Wright's life, what should they do? Should they go to the police? Because J.W. Milam has already threatened Moses Wright's life. What should we do? This kid's now missing. And so Crosby Smith is just kind of a heroic, brave figure in all of this. But he shows up with the deputy sheriff and says, no, the body's going back to Chicago. And in fact, if I have to

take the body myself back to Chicago, I'm going to do it because that's what I promised Mamie Till. So at that point, the body, it's eventually embalmed and is put on a train and arrives back in Chicago on the 2nd. And of course, just not to put too fine a point on it, but without that body coming north, we probably don't know this story. Emmett Till's death was 64 years ago, but he's obviously still a potent symbol of African-American civil rights today. And unfortunately, just last month in the news again, when three white students from the University of Mississippi pose with guns next to a bullet-riddled sign honoring Till, this kind of vandalism has happened before. What is the response from the community in Mississippi and across the country that this still goes on? Well, the response has been a lot of outrage, a lot of I can't believe this is still happening in 2019. But on the Ole Miss campus, when Jerry Mitchell broke that story, he later interviewed some Ole Miss students,

and they didn't know who Emmett Till was. They didn't know why this story mattered. They didn't know why those three frat brothers posing in front of the sign with guns was a big issue. I think having not interviewed a bunch of white people in Mississippi who are hostile to Emmett Till, I do know this, that having talked to a lot of white Mississippians is white Mississippians and black Mississippians do not share the same history of who Emmett Till was and what he did. And so I think a lot of white Mississippians are probably, they feel pretty aggrieved that this Chicago boy is on their landscape forever and they don't like it. And they think of him as a would-be rapist of white women.

And again, that's the William Bradford Huey narrative and that narrative is still there. Part of what we're trying to do with the app is to change that narrative, but it's going to take some time, and we're not naive about that. Is that perhaps the reason for the app and your interest in this event, that this story needs to be known, even though it was a critical turning point for the civil rights movement? How do we forget the story and then remember it? For nearly 30 years, the name Emmett Till was simply, there was no circulation of the name at all, especially in popular culture, in film and documentary. The academics weren't talking about him at all.

And so for 30 years, kind of there's this void. And what begins to change is the documentary Eyes on the Prize, directed and produced by Henry Hampton, changes everything. This documentary is shown for the first time on PBS in 1987. And in the first episode called Awakenings, and this is readily available online if your listeners want to view it. But very early on in Awakenings, we have about a 15-minute segment on the Till case using lots of archival footage, using lots of interviews with Moses Wright, using interviews with James Hicks. So telling the black press's point of view on this. And it's a fascinating 15 minutes. And this is 1987.

And so this very prominent documentary starts to breathe some life back into the case. A couple of years later, we get one of our first books by Stephen J. Whitfield at Brandeis, who recently retired, called A Death in the Delta. And this takes us into the 90s. And some filmmakers get interested in the case. One of them is my good friend Keith Beauchamp. And Keith had promised Mamie Till until her dying day that he would get justice for Emmett. And he does a really terrific documentary that is so good and the interviewing is so powerful that the FBI gets interested. The FBI reopens its case in 2004 and dedicates a lot of resources to trying to get justice for Emmett Till. In 2007, there was a grand jury that was convened.

They heard the evidence that Dale Killinger and the FBI had collected, and they did not issue an indictment. We know from the reporting on the case that Killinger in particular had his eyes on Carolyn Bryant, who was one of the very few survivors still alive, and a black man by the name of Henry Lee Loggins, who may have been in the truck that night. But there was no indictment. And this is 2007. And so that put the case front page news. George W. Bush signs the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Bill in 2008, which gives resources of the federal government to investigating unsolved

civil rights murders. So, yeah, the groundswell of Emmett Till interest really, really picks up in the 90s and then really moves forward in the 2000s. And here we are today where it seems like whenever a young black boy is murdered, especially if there's no justice, Emmett Till's name starts to circulate, right? Whether it's Martin Lee Anderson here in Florida or Trayvon Martin or Jordan Davis, it seems like whenever a young black male is murdered and there's suspicion about that murder in this country, the name Emmett Till comes up. And so we need an accurate history of who Emmett Till was in the first place. And we're getting closer to that, but we're still a long way away. Davis Houck, thank you for talking to me today.

Lindsay, I appreciate you having me. That was my conversation with Florida State University Professor Davis Houck. You can find his app, the Emmett Till Memory Project, on the Apple App Store or Google Play. There's also a link to the project's website in the show notes. And next on American History Tellers, long before the island of Manhattan became the dense and bustling metropolis we know today, it was part of a Dutch colony with two principles at its core, tolerance and capitalism. Those principles helped shape the city of New York.

But how the Dutch came to settle the area and seed those ideas is all the result of a massive blunder. In our next series on Dutch Manhattan, we'll look back at how legendary explorer Henry Hudson discovered Manhattan and how his decisions altered the course of history and spurred the development of one of the world's greatest cities. From Wondery, this is American History Tellers. If you like American History Tellers, you can binge all episodes early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. And before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.

American History Tellers is hosted, edited, and produced by me, Lindsey Graham, for Airship. This episode was produced by Lee Hernandez and Adriana Cargill. Jenny Lauer-Beckman is our editor and producer. Our executive producer is Marshall Louis, created by Hernán López for Wondery. In the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Peru and New Zealand, lies a tiny volcanic island. It's a little-known British territory called Pitcairn,

and it harboured a deep, dark scandal. There wouldn't be a girl on Pitcairn once they reach the age of 10 that would still have heard it. It just happens to all of them. I'm journalist Luke Jones and for almost two years I've been investigating a shocking story that has left deep scars on generations of women and girls from Pitcairn. When there's nobody watching, nobody going to report it, people will get away with what they can get away with. In the Pitcairn Trials, I'll be uncovering a story of abuse and the fight for justice that has brought a unique, lonely Pacific island to the brink of extinction.

Listen to the Pitcairn Trials exclusively on Wondery+. Join Wondery in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.