Here's Where It Gets Interesting - 157. Momentum: The Ripples Made by Ordinary People, Part 12

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

Today in our special series, Momentum: Civil Rights in the 1950s, Sharon rewinds and takes us back to the origin story of a life lost far too soon due to a brutal and racist attack: the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. What began with a young boy who desired to connect with family and learn where his mother came from in Mississippi, ended in horror for the Chicago 14-year-old boy. Though no one will ever know exactly what happened in the grocery store co-owned by Carolyn Bryant leading up to the murder, history will show that what began with a lie from Bryant, resulted in the death of Emmett Till at the hands of Roy Bryant and JW Milam. Three days later, when his body was finally found, it was mutilated and nearly unrecognizable.  After viewing and personally identifying his body, his mother, Mamie, did something completely unexpected: She chose to have an open casket at his funeral. Photographs of his body circulated around the country, appearing in magazines and newspapers. “Time” later selected one of the photographs, showing Mamie over the mutilated body of her dead son, as one of the 100 most influential images of all time. They said, “For almost a century, African Americans were lynched with regularity and impunity. Now, thanks to a mother's determination to expose the barbarousness of this crime, the public could no longer pretend to ignore what they couldn't see.”   The trial was held near where Emmett Till’s body was found. The courtroom was filled to capacity, and the town was overrun with reporters after the story captured national attention. The trial was electrifying. With all of the media attention, what did the all-male, all-white jury find in the verdict after 67 minutes of deliberation, and why? How can someone later admit to murder, yet believe they did nothing wrong? And what happened to Caroline Bryant and the unserved warrant after all this time? We hope you will join us to find out. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, friends. Welcome. Welcome to the 12th installment of our series, Momentum. Momentum brings to light the oftentimes overlooked stories of ordinary Americans during the civil rights movement. Before we begin, I would like to issue a content warning. This episode touches on several violent acts, and you may want to listen with headphones if you have small children. I'm Sharon McMahon, and welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. When we talked last time, I told you that I wanted to return to 1955 and to an event that shook the nation. An event that Dr. King called one of the most brutal and inhuman crimes of the 20th century. But first, let's rewind a little further, back to the 1930s, into a whip-smart, determined young

Black girl who was defying the odds of her time. She was graduating from a predominantly white high school in Chicago's western suburb of Argo, but she'd been born in Mississippi and still had family there. Her name was Mamie Carthen, and she was used to working hard. When she was 13, her parents divorced. Mamie took it pretty rough, and living with her single mother and her brother, she buried herself in her studies, becoming the first African-American student in her school to make the honor roll. Mamie always knew she wanted to continue her studies after high school, but by the end of her senior year, something else had caught her eye. A young, handsome man, an amateur boxer. Mamie knew he had a reputation as a ladies' man, and she also knew her mother didn't approve.

But in October of 1940, Mamie said, I do, and married Louis Till. They were both 18 years old, and nine months later, on July 25, 1941, their son, Emmett, was born. Mamie endured all kinds of physical abuse at the hands of Lewis. He was hot-tempered and prone to violence. They separated before Emmett was even one, but Lewis persisted in harassing Mamie. He regularly violated the restraining order she had obtained against him until finally a judge gave Lewis a choice. Serve jail time or enlist in the U.S. Army. Lewis chose to enlist and Mamie and baby Emmett moved to Chicago's South Side. They were free from the physical and psychological damage of Lewis's abuse and ready to make a fresh start. Side note, Lewis Till was later accused of rape

and murder while he was serving in the military overseas. Ultimately, the United States military executed him via hanging on July 2nd, 1945. Growing up, Emmett, who was nicknamed Bobo, was surrounded by friends and family. The Southside neighborhood that Mamie and Emmett moved to was middle class and full of successful Black-owned businesses. Blacks and whites were segregated, but the Chicago community was thriving, which helped Mamie and Emmett to thrive too. Emmett attended an all-Black elementary school not far from his home. And even though he contracted polio in kindergarten, he recovered well, but he was plagued with a lifelong slight stutter. And to help him offset that stutter, one of the things that Mamie taught him to do was to whistle before saying certain words. He had difficulty pronouncing his B's and she taught him how to sort of blow his air out like you might be whistling before

pronouncing words that began with a B. Emmett was very devoted to his mother. He pitched in at home without complaint. He once told her, if you can go out and make the money, I can take care of the house. In 1951, Mamie remarried and she and Emmett moved to Detroit. But he missed living in Chicago. He missed living near his grandmother. And so he returned to Illinois. And not long after, his mother and stepfather returned to Chicago. In the summer of 1955, Emmett wanted to see Mississippi for himself. They had been visited by family that still lived there, and Emmett was eager to see where his mother had come from and to learn about a different part of the country. Before he left, his mother told him, Chicago and Mississippi are two different worlds. You should know how to behave in front of whites

in the South. He said that he understood. Brown versus the Board of Education, parts one and two, had served to increase racial tensions throughout the South. Many of us today think that, well, Brown versus the Board of Education ended school segregation, fixed that problem. No, it did not fix that problem in many places. And in some places, it actually inflamed problems temporarily. Some pro-segregationists believed that integrating schools would do things like lead to interracial marriage, and in many places interracial relationships were prohibited. Emmett Till arrived in Money, Mississippi on August 21st, 1955. And a few days later, he and his cousin Curtis skipped church and joined some friends at a nearby grocery store to

buy candy. The friends were the children of sharecroppers, and they'd been out picking cotton all day. And this grocery store that they visited mostly served the local sharecropper population. It was owned by a white couple named Roy and Carolyn Bryant. Carolyn was alone in the front of the store that day and her sister-in-law was in the back watching children. Emmett's cousin named Curtis left him with their friends while Curtis walked across the street to play checkers. And what happened in the store next remains in dispute.

According to what Curtis said, the friends they met up with said that Emmett had taken a picture out of his wallet. And the picture had a class that he attended at a school in Chicago. It had both white and black students in it. And Curtis said that Emmett bragged that he was friends with the white children in the integrated class. And he either pointed to a white girl in the picture or had a separate picture of a white girl and said, that is my girlfriend. And also according to Curtis, some of the boys then dared Emmett to speak to Carolyn Bryant, the owner of the store, who was 21 years old. Another account that was shared by Emmett Till's cousin, who was also present,

said the things in Curtis's account never happened. According to Emmett's cousin, Emmett did not have a photo of a white girl in his wallet and nobody dared him to speak to Carolyn Bryant. And as recently as 2015, his cousin said, we did not dare him to go into the store. The white folks said that. They said he had pictures of his white girlfriend. There were no pictures. They never talked to me. They never interviewed me. In fact, an FBI report that was completed in 2006 noted that Curtis recanted his statements about the pictures. Some other accounts of what happened said that Emmett wolf whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a wolf whistle being like the that you associate with telling somebody they're

good looking. Emmett's cousin, the one who was with him at the store, said that he wolf whistled at Carolyn. And he said, I think he wanted to get a laugh out of us or something. He was always joking around and sometimes it was hard to tell when he was serious. But he said as soon as Emmett Wolf whistled at Carolyn Bryant, he became immediately alarmed. He said they could not get out of there fast enough because he had never heard of anything like that before. A black boy whistling at a white woman in Mississippi? No. He said the KKK and Knight Riders were a part of our daily lives. Carolyn Bryant's version of the events went like this. Emmett Till grabbed her hand while she was stocking candy and said how about a date baby she said he followed her to the cash register and grabbed her waist and said what's the matter baby you can't

take it she also claimed that he said you don't need to be afraid of me and then she said he used one unprintable word. He said, according to Carolyn, I've been with white women before. And then Carolyn claimed that one of his friends came into the store, wrapped him by the arm, and made him leave. Now, just for context, Emmett Till was barely 14 years old. In 2008, a historian that was interviewing Carolyn Bryant said that she told him the statements she made about Emmett Till making verbal and physical advances, they were a lie. Emmett's cousin said he was in the store for less than one minute and he had no inappropriate behavior and no lecherous conversations with Carol and Bryant. He said that Emmett paid for his stuff and then left the store. And in 2006, the FBI also noted that they had a second source who was confirmed to be in the store at the same time as Emmett and Carolyn, who supported his cousin's account. Another author

said that in an interview with attorneys, Carolyn Bryant had initially told one version of their encounter that included Emmett Till grabbing her hand and asking her for a date, but not the part about him grabbing her waist or mentioning past relationships with white women or having to be dragged unwillingly out of the store by another boy. Regardless, Carolyn Bryant left the store, went out to her car, and retrieved a pistol from underneath the seat. All of the teenagers saw her do this, and they left immediately while Carolyn was outside. Allegedly, Emmett whistled while Carolyn was walking to her car, and it is unclear if he was whistling at or towards Carolyn, or if he was whistling to people who were playing checkers across the street.

I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together, we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

It is my girl in the studio! and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It is my girl in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Lady 6.0 episodes every Wednesday.

Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. and wherever you get your podcasts. Carolyn did not tell her husband, Roy, about the incident with the boys. She later said that she didn't tell him because she was afraid he would beat up Emmett Till.

But he found out about it from a person who had hung around down at the store and her husband, Roy, was angry at Carolyn for not telling him about the encounter with Emmett Till and his friends. After Roy found out about the incident, he harassed several young men who had entered the store, and that evening he and another man approached a black teenager walking along the road. Roy Bryant ordered the man who was with him to seize the boy, put him in the back of the pickup truck, and then they took him to be identified by a companion of Carolyn's who had witnessed the

episode with Emmett Till. Carolyn's friend said, oh, that's not him. And eventually, Roy Bryant learned that the boy in the incident at his store was from Chicago and that he was staying with a man named Mose Wright. Mose Wright was Emmett Till's great uncle. Several people overheard Roy and his half-brother, whose name was J.W. Milam, Milam discussing taking Emmett Till from his house. And sometime between 2 and 3.30 a.m. on the morning of August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, drove to Moe's house where Emmett Till was staying. J.W. was armed with a pistol and a flashlight, and he asked Mose if there were boys in the house from Chicago. Emmett's great aunt offered the men money. They refused and told Emmett to hurry up and put on his clothes. Emmett's uncle Mose told Roy and J.W.,

listen, he's from up north. He doesn't know any better. And J.W. Milam asked Mose, how old are you, preacher? And Mose said, 64. And J.W. said, if you tell anybody, you won't live to see 65. The men marched Emmett out to their truck. The men marched Emmett out to their truck. Moe said he heard them ask someone in the car if this was the boy, and he heard someone with a lighter voice say yes. They tied Emmett Till in the back of a green pickup truck and drove toward Money, Mississippi. They put him in a barn, and they beat him savagely.

Multiple witnesses who were walking by heard the beating. They then put Emmett Till in the back of their truck and drove to a cotton gin to take a 70-pound fan. They drove up and down the banks of the river looking for a place to dispose of Emmett Till. They shot him on the banks of the river and weighed down his body with the 70-pound fan. In an interview the following year, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam said they had intended to beat him

and throw him off an embankment into the river to frighten him. But they said that when they were beating him, Emmett called them names and claimed he had had sexual encounters with white women. And that was the motivation they needed to kill him. Roy and J.W. returned to Roy's house and reportedly burned all of Emmett's clothes. Emmett's uncle, Mose, waited on his front porch for 20 minutes for Emmett to return, and then he went and got another man, and they drove around until 8 a.m. the next morning trying to find Emmett. Emmett's cousin then called the sheriff and ultimately Emmett's mother. Roy and J.W. were questioned by the county sheriff, whose name was George Smith. They

admitted that they had taken him from his uncle's house, but they claimed they released him. They were arrested for kidnapping. And when word got out that Emmett Till was missing, Medgar Evers, who was the Mississippi secretary of the NAACP, and another man became involved. By the way, I have a podcast about Medgar Evers that you can listen to. They disguised themselves as cotton pickers and went into the cotton fields in search of any information that might help find Emmett. in search of any information that might help find Emmett. Three days later, Emmett's nearly unrecognizable body was found by two boys who were fishing in the Tallahatchie River.

He had been badly mutilated and had been shot right above the right ear. One of his eyes was dislodged from its socket, and the fan blade had been fastened around his neck with barbed wire. He was wearing a silver ring with the initials LT, his father's initials, and the date May 25, 1943 carved into it. Mose was called to the river to identify Emmett. The ring was removed and eventually given to the district attorney as evidence. The following year, J.W. Milam gave an interview to Look Magazine where he said, and let me tell you, this is disturbing. He said, quote, well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I'm no bully. I would never hurt an

N-word in my life. I like N-words in their place. I know how to work them. But I just decided that it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, N-words are going to stay in their place. N-words ain't going gonna vote where I live. And if they did, they'd control the government. They ain't gonna go to school with my kids. And when an N-word gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he's tired of living. I'm likely to kill him. Me and my folks fought for this country and we got some rights. I stood there in that shed and I listened to that n-word throw that poison at me and I just made up my mind. Chicago boy, I said. I'm tired of them sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. I'm going to make an example of you just so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.

Newspapers reported on Emmett's death with words spreading quickly around the country. They printed pictures of an adorable young Emmett smiling with his mother. Editorials and letters to the editor were printed saying things like, Now is the time for every citizen who loves the state of Mississippi to stand up and be counted before hoodlum white trash brings us to destruction. Emmett's mother demanded that his body be sent back to Chicago. She later said that she wanted no one to hastily bury him in Mississippi, and so she called local and state authorities in both Illinois and Mississippi to make sure that didn't happen and that her son was returned to her. Hugh White, who was the governor of Mississippi, personally sent a telegram to the NAACP offices saying that there would be a full investigation and assuring them that Mississippi did not condone what happened.

And when the funeral home received Emmett's body, his mother insisted on viewing it to make a positive identification. She said the stench was noticeable from two blocks away. And then she did something very unexpected. She insisted on having an open casket funeral. She said, there is no way I could just describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see. Many tens of thousands of people lined the street outside the mortuary to view Emmett's body and even more attended his funeral a few days later. Photographs of his body circulated around the country, appearing in magazines and newspapers. Time magazine later selected one of the photographs showing Mamie standing over the mutilated body of her dead son as one of the 100 most influential images of all time. They said for almost a century, African Americans were lynched with regularity and impunity. And now, thanks to a mother's determination to expose the barbarousness of this crime, the public could no longer pretend

to ignore what they couldn't see. As news of Emmett's murder continued to spread, white opinion in Mississippi began to shift, and according to one historian, a specific type of prejudice was particularly strong in Mississippi. It was this notion that whites were urged to reject the influence of northern opinions. The Tallahatchie County Sheriff, who had initially said that the case against Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam was pretty good, then announced his doubts that the body pulled from the Tallahatchie River was actually Emmett Till. He speculated that, oh, Emmett Till is probably still alive, and the NAACP had planted that body there. He claimed that there had been a big collusion to take Emmett Till's ring and put it on the body. Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were indicted for murder.

body. Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were indicted for murder. The prosecuting attorney didn't know if he could get a conviction in the case because it was a case of white violence against a black man who was accused of insulting a white woman. Both defendants initially had difficulty finding attorneys to represent them, but five attorneys at a law firm eventually offered their services for free, and supporters of Roy and J.W. placed collection jars around the city in stores and eventually raised over $10,000 for their defense. The trial was held near where Emmett's body was found. The small town was overrun by reporters from all over the country, and one historian called it the first great media event of the civil rights movement. trial began, a young man named Frank arrived to report to Emmett's family and their associates that he knew of two witnesses to the crime. They were Black employees of J.W. Milam's brother, and it was J.W.'s brother who had owned the barn that they had taken Emmett to and beaten him in.

The prosecution had been unaware of these employees, but the sheriff, to keep them from testifying, arrested them and booked them into jail without telling anyone. The trial took place in September of 1955. It took five days. The courtroom was filled to capacity. Some witnesses remembered that jury members were allowed to drink beer while they were on duty and that the white spectators in the courtroom wore handguns. The goal of the defense was to cast doubt on the identity of the body that they had pulled from the river. They claimed it couldn't be positively identified. They questioned whether Till was dead.

They said that although Roy and J.W. had taken Emmett from his great-uncle's house, they released him that night. They also attempted to say that Mose, Emmett's great-uncle, could not identify Roy and J.W. as the men who took Emmett from his cabin. This was not true. Mose positively identified J.W. Milam pointing to him and saying, Mose positively identified J.W. Milam, pointing to him and saying, There he is. Reporters called this a historic moment filled with electricity. And it may have been the first time in the South that a black man had testified about the guilt of a white man and lived. Another reporter said his identification of J.W. Milam in

the courtroom was the most dramatic thing he had ever seen in his career. Emmett's mother, Mamie, took the stand and she said that she had instructed her son to watch his manners in Mississippi and should the situation ever arise, he should get down on his knees and ask for forgiveness from a white person, and he should do it without a thought. The defense tried to say that Mamie only positively ID'd her son in the casket because she had a $400 life insurance policy on him. The prosecutor kept trying to locate the black men who were allegedly witnesses to the crime, but they couldn't. They did find three other witnesses who had seen the men with J.W. and Roy, and they could hear someone being beaten and someone crying. One of the witnesses said he heard the victim call out, Mama, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.

In the closing statements, the prosecutor said that whatever Emmett did that was wrong, he deserved a spanking for, not a murder. The defense said that the jury's forefathers would turn over in their graves if they convicted Roy and J.W. And the only permitted outcomes of the case under Mississippi law at the time were life imprisonment, the death penalty, or an acquittal. After 67 minutes, the all-white, all-male jury acquitted both defendants. All-male jury acquitted both defendants. In later interviews, some of the jurors acknowledged that they knew Roy and J.W. were guilty, but they didn't think that life imprisonment or the death penalty were fit punishments for a white person killing a black person.

Later that year, prosecutors tried to charge Roy and J.W. with kidnapping because they admitted to kidnapping Emmett, but a grand jury declined to indict them. Having been acquitted and protected from future prosecution, the next year J.W. and Roy offered to tell their story to Look magazine in exchange for money. The interview took place in the law firm of the attorneys that had defended them, and JW admitted to shooting Emmett Till, but neither of them believed they were guilty or had done anything wrong. Reaction to this interview was explosive. They admitted that they had murdered Emmett Till, and this admission contributed to the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which authorized the Department of Justice to intervene in local law enforcement issues

when individual civil rights were being compromised. Over the years, multiple documentaries have been produced examining the facts surrounding this case. In 2004, the Department of Justice announced it was reopening the case to determine whether anyone else was involved. The body was exhumed and dental comparisons were taken, DNA was examined, and an anthropological analysis was done. And the exhumed body was positively identified as that of Emmett Till. He had a broken left femur, two broken wrists, extensive cranial damage, and metal fragments in his skull that were consistent with the gun that was used to shoot him. In an interview, his mother said, two months ago, I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son.

When something happens to the Negroes in the South, I said, that's their business, not mine. And now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of all of us. Mamie's often spoken about in the media and by historians as a mother who was called to activism by the murder of her son. But I think that analysis sells her short. Through her work after Emmett's death, you can see evidence of the person she always was. She was the girl who believed in education, the young woman who had the courage to leave a violent man, and the hard worker who knew how to persevere when faced with brutality, sorrow, and the absence of justice.

Recently, in June of 2022, a group from the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation was given permission to search through the files in the basement of the courthouse in Mississippi. The women conducting the search, Deborah and Terry Watts, are cousins of Emmett Till's. Meticulously looking through bank boxes, Deborah and Terry found an unserved warrant that charged Carolyn Bryant with the 1955 kidnapping of Emmett Till. The warrant, which has since been certified as genuine, was dated for August 29, 1955. was dated for August 29, 1955. Jerobo Hill, who represents Emmett Till's family, said, we would like to see the warrant served because it has not expired.

He said, we want to see that warrant served on Carolyn Bryant. However, the Mississippi Attorney General's office says there's no plan to arrest or prosecute Carolyn Bryant. On July 15, 2022, Michelle Williams, who is the chief of staff for the Attorney General in Mississippi, told the Associated Press that there's no new evidence to open the case back up. The Till family is not surprised. The Till family is not surprised. They told NPR, There was, and there still exists today, the white pedestal theory where white women are above reproach. Back in the day when the lynchings were raging and Mississippi had the largest number of lynchings,

we know that many of those lynchings occurred because there was an alleged encounter between a black man and a white woman. It seems Bryant, even in the face of new evidence, will remain unprosecuted. About a week after Deborah and Terry Watts found the unserved warrant, the Associated Press came into possession of Carolyn Bryant's unpublished memoir. It had been compiled by her daughter-in-law a number of years ago, and in it, Bryant frames herself as the victim, writing that she always felt like a victim as well as Emmett and paid dearly with an altered life. She also wrote, I did not wish Emmett any harm and could not stop harm from coming to him since I didn't know what was planned for him. I tried to protect him by telling Roy that he's not the one. That's not him. Please take him home.

Carolyn Bryant is now 87 years old. Emmett Till would be 81 if Carolyn's lie had not caused his death on that August afternoon in 1955, a month after his 14th birthday. A few months after his murder, a rally was held for him in Montgomery, Alabama. It was attended by Rosa Parks. tended by Rosa Parks. And soon after, she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus. Rosa said that when she did not get up and move to the back of the bus,

I thought of Emmett Till, and I just couldn't go back. Join me next time when we talk about how religion was used both as a weapon of oppression and a tool of liberation in the struggle for freedom. I'll see you soon. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend? All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was

written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer, Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.