naacp – Tragedy and Farce

On August 28, 1955, a fourteen year old African-American boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, was kidnapped, brutally murdered and tossed into the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white women in a lewd manner while visiting his relatives in Mississippi. Till’s murder would spark a wave of righteous indignation across the nation because of sheer brutality of the lynching and the young age of the victim and become the catalyst for what would become known as the Civil Rights movement.

The summer of 1955 was a hot one in the United States. Racial tensions were on the rise in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the case of Brown v. Board of Education which declared race-based segregation unconstitutional. Bitter and angry Southern whites vowed a campaign of “massive resistance” to counter the court’s orders to desegregate and other threats to what they perceived as their way of life. In the months before Till’s murder, Rev. George Lee and Lamar Smith were separately shot and killed in Mississippi after helping organize black voter-registration drives. It was against this backdrop that Mamie Till sent her only child to visit her relatives in Money, Mississippi, hoping to escape the boredom of another Chicago summer. Before he left for Mississippi, Mrs. Till urged her son to be careful and to watch how he behaved in front of white people there because Chicago and Mississippi were completely different. “Even though you think you’re perfectly within your right, for goodness sake take low,” she said, according to subsequently published accounts. “If necessary, get on your knees and beg apologies.”

Till arrived at his uncle Mose Wright’s home on August 21. Three days later, he and his two cousins, had skipped church where their uncle was preaching and instead headed to the local grocery store to buy some candy. The grocery store mostly served the local sharecropper population and was owned by a poor white couple, 24-year-old Roy Bryant and his 21-year-old wife Carolyn. Carolyn Bryant was alone in the front of the store that day; her sister-in-law was in the rear of the store watching children. What actually happened on August 21 is subject to multiple conflicting accounts but most claim that Till had whistled at Bryant or had engaged in some other lewd advance, something that was a serious taboo in the Jim Crowe South. Bryant stormed out of the store and warned she was going to get a pistol.

Till and his cousins immediately understood the gravity of the situation. They quickly fled the scene at the urging of some of the older men around town hoping to avoid any unwanted violence. Till refrained from telling his uncle what had happened, fearful that he might incur a reprimand and pleaded to return home to Chicago. A few days later, Roy Bryant and his half brother , J.W. Millam went to Mose Wright’s home, in the dead, of night, and abducted the terrified 14-year old at gun point. They marched Till to the back of their pick up truck and tied him up before driving off to an isolated barn where they proceeded to teach the young boy a deadly lesson. There they viciously beat Till as the boy begged for his mother. They poked out his eye, shot him in the head, and tied a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to his neck with barbed wire before tossing his body into the Tallahatchie River with no remorse for what they had done.

*The barn where Emmett Till was beaten and killed*

When Till’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie river, his mother could barely identify her son. Nevertheless, Mamie Till was determined that her only son would not die in vain. Mississippi officials pressured her to burry Emmett in Mississippi in a closed casket ceremony hoping to avoid a spectacle. Mamie Till ignored the pressure and brought Emmett Till’s badly disfigured body back to Chicago where she held an open casket funeral hoping to capture the nation’s attention and shine a spotlight on the deep racism and white supremacist violence directed at African-Americans in the South. The train carrying Till’s body was greeted by large crowds while over 200,000 people paid their respects during the four days of public viewings. Jet Magazine published an expose of photos of Till’s mangled body and his grieving mother at the funeral that went reverberated across the nation and around the world. These images would accelerate the civil rights movement and inspire African-American Americans to put life and limb at risk in pursuit of racial equality and justice. Less than six months later, an African-American woman in Montgomery Alabama named Rosa Parks was arrested and fined for refusing to give her bus seat to a white passenger. When asked why she refused to move Parks explained that she thought about going to the back of the bus but then she thought about Emmett Till and she couldn’t do it.

*Left: Emmett Till’s disfigured corpse, Right: Mamie Till at the funeral*

Within a day after Till’s disappearance, both Bryant and Millam were arrested but the chances of two white men being convicted of murdering an African-American boy in 1950s Mississippi were somewhere between slim and none. The two men were put on trial in September and battle lines were quickly drawn. Every lawyer in the county donated their services and $10,000 was collected from local businessmen in support of Bryant and Millam’s defense. Moreover, many whites showed up to watch the trial, bringing their children, picnic baskets and ice cream cones. Meanwhile, African American spectators were relegated to the back and looked on in fear. Neither Bryant nor Millam would be called to the stand to testify and they would eventually be acquitted by an all white male jury after only 67 minutes of deliberations. Jurors later admitted in interviews that although they knew Bryant and Milam were guilty of Till’s murder, they did not think imprisonment or the death penalty were appropriate punishments for white men who had killed a black man. After the verdict was read, Bryant and Millam defiantly walked out of the courtroom lit up cigars and kissed their wives in celebration.

*Left: J.W. Milam and his wife Right: Roy Bryant and Carolyn Bryant*

Months later, the two men confessed to killing Till in an interview with Look magazine in exchange for $4,000, however, because of the precedent of double jeopardy in U.S. law, they were never tried again for the murder. In 2017, Carolyn Bryant recanted her testimony, admitting that Till had never touched, threatened or harassed her. “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him,” she said.

On June 12, 1963, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was gunned down in his driveway outside his home in Jackson Mississippi by white supremacist and segregationist Byron De La Beckwith. Emerging from his automobile after a late night NAACP meeting, Evers was shot in the back by Beckwith who had been positioned across the street waiting to ambush him. The bullet pierced through his heart but he managed to stagger to his door. Evers’ wife, Myrlie, and his three children—who were still awake after watching an important civil rights speech by President John F. Kennedy—heard the gun shot and hurried outside. They were soon joined by neighbors and police. Evers was rushed to the hospital where he was initially denied admission because of his race. He died less than 50 minutes later at the age of 37. Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

*Medgar Evers, the NAACP Field Director for Mississippi*

Evers was a decorated World War II veteran who had fought at Normandy in 1944. However, like many other African-American veterans, he returned to a nation that denied him his citizenship rights at the polls. In 1946, Evers attempted to cast a ballot but twenty armed white men, some of whom had been his childhood friends, had learned of his plans to vote and turned up to threaten him. Evers feared for his life. “I made up my mind that it would not be like that again,” he vowed.

Shortly after the landmark Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, Evers volunteered to challenge segregation in higher education and applied to the University of Mississippi School of Law. He was rejected on a technicality, but his willingness to risk harassment and threats for racial justice caught the eye of national NAACP leadership; he was soon hired as the organization’s first field secretary in Mississippi.

Evers was one of Mississippi’s leading civil rights activists. He fought racial injustices in many forms from segregation to how the state and local legal systems handled crimes against African Americans. Evers’ work put him squarely in the crosshairs of the White Citizens Council, a white supremacist group formed in the aftermath of the Brown ruling devoted to preserving segregation. He garnered national attention for organizing demonstrations and boycotts to help integrate Jackson’s privately owned buses, the public parks, Mississippi’s Gulf Coast beaches as well as the Mississippi State Fair. He led voter registration drives, and helped secure legal assistance for James Meredith, a black man whose 1962 attempt to enroll in the University of Mississippi was met with riots and state resistance.

Beckwith was arrested on June 21, 1963 for the murder of Evers but would escape conviction for most of his life, largely due to the racist system of justice that dominated the deep South in the 1960s. He was tried twice in February and April 1964 but in each trial the two all white juries failed to reach a verdict resulting in two mistrials. Beckwith received the support of some of Mississippi’s most prominent citizens, including then-Governor Ross Barnett, who appeared at Beckwith’s first trial to shake hands with the defendant in full view of the jury. After his release Beckwith bragged about his skill with a rifle and hinting to segregationist friends that, indeed, he had killed Evers.

That Beckwith would not be held accountable, while reprehensible, was hardly surprising and consistent with what was increasingly the norm across the South. African-Americans and civil rights activists could expect little legal protection from the courts and law enforcement in the 1960s South which operated largely to preserve segregation and often ignored the facts when white defendants were accused of harming African-Americans. Moreover, most African-Americans were still disenfranchised by Jim Crow laws and therefore ineligible for jury duty. The two white men who murdered fourteen year old Emmet Till eight years earlier for allegedly whistling at a white woman were acquitted . The Ku Klux Klan members that perpetrated the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama later that year also escaped justice. The same for the murderers of three civil rights workers in Mississippi the following year.

*Mylie Evers and son Daniel Kenyatta Evers at Medgar Evers’ funeral*

*Evers’ assassin, the unrepentant Byron De La Beckwith*

*Evers’ home and the driveway where he was shot*

Evers’ assassination was a pivotal moment in the Civil Rights movement, a bloody milestone in the fight for racial equality that began with the murder of 14 year-old Emmett Till eight years earlier. It would also prove to be a harbinger of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. by James Earl Ray five years later.

Tag: naacp

Justice Not Served: The Death of Emmett Till, August 28, 1955

Ghosts of Mississippi: The Assassination of Medgar Evers, June 12, 1963