The Murder That Breathed Life Into the Civil Rights Movement : Mississippi: Emmett Till was just 14, but when he flirted with a white woman in 1955, her husband killed him. That started changes.

Mamie Till Bradley had taken to her bed. She wasn’t sure she would ever be able to get up again, not to face the world of pain and hate, a world from which her only child had been so brutally taken.

“It was the Wednesday morning that we learned the body had surfaced. Up until then, there was that hope that he would turn up alive . . .

“I wasn’t interested in doing anything but going into a shell. I went to bed. I was sort of in a twilight zone.

“Then I recognized a presence. It was like a big cloud in the room. Something not visible, but you could feel it. I was raised to a sitting position. I began to ask questions right away, not in words, but I could understand: Why my son? Why did he have to be taken away from me?

“I was told that Emmett was sent here for a special job. I had been privileged to be the one to take care of him on Earth.

“Now, there was another job for me to do.”

As she vividly described that spiritual experience, 40 years later, she laughed softly, recalling another message from that evening: “Emmett Till will never be forgotten.”

*

In the early morning hours of Aug. 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett (Bobo) Till, visiting from Chicago, was rousted from his bed in his uncle’s Mississippi shack by two white men in search of vengeance. His crime--flirting with a white woman.

Three days later, his body--eye detached, ear missing, head bashed in--was spotted by a fisherman on the Tallahatchee River. With his death, a powerful, lasting symbol was born.

“His bloated face was the ugliness of American racism staring us right in the eye,” said Clenora Hudson-Weems, a University of Missouri-Columbia professor and author of “Emmett Till: Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement.” “It became the catalyst for the civil rights movement. It set the stage for the Montgomery bus boycott three months later.”

There were hundreds of lynchings in this country from post-Reconstruction to the climactic 1960s civil rights achievements.

Indeed, two black men who had advocated voting rights for their race had been murdered earlier in 1955 in Mississippi. But the bullet fired into a brash, handsome boy’s head would be a shot heard round the world.

His mother demanded that he be brought home for burial and she insisted upon an open casket for the grisly corpse and a public viewing that drew tens of thousands.

“Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box so horribly battered and waterlogged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son?” she asked then.

The subsequent trial in this Mississippi Delta town of two white men was covered by journalists from all over, and their acquittals spurred worldwide outrage. It was “the first great media event of the civil rights movement,” wrote David Halberstam in his 1993 book, “The Fifties.”

“For whatever reason--the brutality of the murder of a child, the public funeral in Chicago, or the vague sense among many in the North that something like this was bound to happen--the case became a cause celebre,” Halberstam wrote.

*

Emmett’s mother and grandmother didn’t want him to go to their native Mississippi. He didn’t understand. After all, his cousins from Mississippi had stayed with him, so why couldn’t he stay at their home?

Finally, they gave in. Before a goodby kiss and watching his train pull away, his mother drilled Emmett on Mississippi mores--say, “Yes sir,” “No sir,” don’t look whites straight in the eye, don’t talk to them unless spoken to.

“He had no idea. It was like another culture,” recalls Wheeler Parker Jr., one of several cousins who accompanied Emmett on the train.

They arrived Aug. 20. Emmett, a stocky, round-faced boy who wore fine clothes, soon was the talk of the little town of Money, Miss. He claimed to have a white girlfriend and flashed her school picture around.

“He was full of fun, liked jokes and pranks,” Parker said. “He was the life of the party, always the center of attention.”

One day they had a flat tire in a white neighborhood, Parker said. He and the others carefully avoided looking around for fear of “eyeballing” a white woman.

Emmett found such behavior comical. A couple days later, he apparently decided to show off when, after a morning of farm chores and swimming, a group of eight or so went to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market in Money.

There are different versions of what happened next. While buying bubble gum and candy, Emmett said something to storekeeper Carolyn Bryant, a pretty white brunette whom a French newspaper would later breathlessly describe as “a crossroads Marilyn Monroe.”

She claimed he grabbed her hand and assured her he had been with white women before.

As he left the store, he whistled loudly. Several witnesses said it was definitely a “wolf whistle.”

To this day, his mother theorizes that all Emmett did was what she had taught him in an effort to overcome his speech impediment--when he would stammer, she told him, just whistle and “blow it out.” She thinks when asked what he had bought, he struggled over “bubble gum” and whistled.

Hudson-Weems, the professor, bristles at references to Emmett “allegedly” whistling at the white woman.

“When you say ‘allegedly’ it’s as if to say he did something wrong,” she said. “All it was was a teen-age boy going through the rites of passage.”

Carolyn Bryant stormed out of the store, Parker remembers, and people playing checkers on the porch warned she was getting a gun. The boys raced away.

They made it home, and the incident seemed behind them.

Bryant’s husband, Roy, had been trucking shrimp with his half-brother, J.W. Milam. Again, there are varying versions of how they found out about the incident after they returned home. Some say they were told by a jealous Mississippi cousin of Emmett, others that word of the daring flirtation had spread quickly.

Whatever, Milam’s pickup truck roared up to Mose Wright’s house around 2 a.m. Aug. 28. They told Emmett’s uncle they wanted “the nigger who done the talking” and threatened the 64-year-old preacher that he wouldn’t live to see 65 if he interfered.

Parker says they barged into his room first.

“My whole bed was shaking. I thought they were going to kill everybody in the house,” he recalls. Facing a drawn revolver, he made a quick promise to dedicate his life to God if he survived.

But Emmett stepped forward. “Yeah,” he said, to the anger of the white men who wanted to be called “sir.”

They left with him. It was the last time any of his relatives saw Emmett alive.

*

Bryant and Milam were arrested the next day, but claimed they had only questioned Emmett. On the 31st, his body was found; it had been weighted with a cotton gin fan.

With help from Illinois officials, Emmett’s mother got his body home. Driven by her otherworldly experience the evening she learned of his death, she wanted as many people as possible to see her mangled boy.

Jet magazine carried the photo of the corpse. Outrage swelled beyond Chicago’s black community.

The trial of Bryant and Milam brought hundreds of journalists to the courthouse on the square of this town, where a sign at that time proudly announced: “Sumner: A Good Place To Raise A Boy.”

Initially, the suspects were rejected even by their white neighbors, but the unprecedented attention triggered a backlash, as some began to sense a piling on by Northerners. A bumper sticker read: “Mississippi: The Most Lied-About State in the Union.”

Sheriff H.C. Strider voiced what became a locally popular theory--that the whole thing was an NAACP conspiracy, that the mutilated body had been dug up and planted while Emmett was taken to Detroit to hide out.

Prosecutors and other state officials were fighting a losing battle. Their only witnesses would be Mose Wright and one of Emmett’s cousins, and they could only say that they had seen Emmett taken away. The defendants acknowledged that, but claimed they turned him loose.

One night, white reporters Clark Porteous of the Memphis Press-Scimitar and Jim Featherston and Doug Shoemaker of the Jackson Daily News were summoned to the nearby all-black town of Mound Bayou. There, joined by black reporters, they were told of additional witnesses by blacks who assumed they wouldn’t be taken seriously by white authorities.

Thus was launched what Jet magazine reporter Simeon Booker would later call “an incredible interracial manhunt . . . the unique cooperation of Negro and white reporters, top Negro leaders and Mississippi law enforcers working together in a hard-hitting team. . . .”

They fanned out across the Delta. Among others, they located Willie Reed, a teen-age field hand who would testify to hearing Emmett being beaten for hours.

Other witnesses disappeared, despite the efforts of activists such as Medgar Evers, who risked his life by posing as a field hand while trying to protect witnesses--smuggling one out of town in a coffin--in his role as an NAACP field secretary. Eight years later, Evers would be assassinated in Mississippi by a white supremacist.

One black reporter’s dispatch at the time described a county fair-type atmosphere at the courthouse, with white locals carrying picnic lunches. The defendants’ children sat on their laps and played loudly.

Mamie Till Bradley said she walked into the courthouse as young white boys banged cap guns at her and their fathers slapped their knees laughing at how she started.

Although virtually no one expected a conviction, the trial brought high drama. Mose Wright stood up in the courtroom and pointed his finger at each defendant, identifying them with a “Thar he!”

Judge Curtis Swango showed commitment to a just trial, refusing to allow the all-white jury to hear the expected inflammatory testimony of Carolyn Bryant. Nevertheless, they returned with their not-guilty verdicts barely an hour later, and the jury foreman snapped to a reporter that it was only that long because they stopped to “drink a pop.”

But for blacks, the truth had been made clear by the courage of people such as Wright.

“It was the first time African-Americans stood up on our hind legs and said, ‘No more.’ So forceful was the momentum that it swept a lot of people into positions where they couldn’t refuse to participate,” said Charles Tisdale, who covered the trial as a young black reporter and now is chief editor of the Jackson Advocate.

A few months later, Milam and Bryant were paid $3,500 to $4,000 for the “true” story after they were assured they could not be tried again. Milam, a World War II hero, did the talking in a story carried in “Look” magazine.

“What else could we do? He was hopeless,” said Milam, explaining that he and his half-brother had meant only to scare Emmett, but were unable to bring him to his knees. “ ‘Chicago boy,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of ‘em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. . . . I’m going to make an example of you.”

Emmett was taken to the river bank, stripped down, and Milam asked him again: “You still as good as I am?”

“Yeah,” Emmett replied defiantly.

*

Reporters who checked on Milam and Bryant in ensuing years learned that their store closed after a boycott by their mostly black clientele, they were ostracized by most whites, and both got divorced.

Today they are dead and largely forgotten.

But Emmett’s name lived on, invoked by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others as they began the civil rights movement in earnest. His killing touched many of his teen-age peers of the time--Muhammad Ali’s autobiography would recall the case, and Bob Dylan would write a song about Till.

There was a series of nonfiction books, a novel, a play by Toni Morrison, and several documentaries preserving the life and death of Emmett Till. He may have altered countless lives.

Cousin Wheeler Parker, for example, is now a pastor and community activist in Illinois, keeping the promise he made that night 40 years ago.

Emmett’s mother, now Mamie Till Mobley, admits that her tragedy awakened her from a comfortable life as an Air Force civilian employee who tuned out the racial injustice around her.

She became a civil rights activist and a teacher. Three decades ago, she started “The Emmett Till Players.” She teaches its young members to make presentations to her church. Every player, she says proudly, has graduated from high school.

And in her Chicago home, with husband Gene Mobley, she keeps photos of Emmett, the only child she ever had. She has many fond memories of a son she says cooked and ironed while she worked, then sat by the telephone to grab it on the first ring while she slept.

“My most common thought is, ‘What would you have been today?’ I know he would have been successful. Emmett was a go-getter and a doer.”

But she is comforted by knowing that he lives on as a symbol who inspired others.

“It had to be my son,” she said. “He did the job he was specially prepared to do.”