♪ I know the one thing that we did right was the day we started to fight ♪
♪ Keep your eyes on the prize. Hold on. Hold on ♪
♪ Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on ♪
♪ (country music) ♪
- On August 21st, 1955 two teenagers from Chicago boarded a train and traveled south
to visit family in Mississippi.
- We was going down there to pick some (inaudible).
I'd never picked any (inaudible) before and I was looking to do that
because I told my mother that I could pick 200 pounds
and she told me I couldn't, you know.
So you usually go down there looking for a good time, you know.
- For more than a year, racial tensions in the South had been higher than usual.
Since the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education
that segregated schools were unconstitutional.
The decision touched a raw nerve in the white South
and many organized to preserve white supremacy.
(applause)
For years groups like the Ku Klux Klan practiced terrorism.
Despite national Black protests, public murders of Blacks were common
and the mobs who committed them went unpunished.
In the previous seventy years, there had been more than five hundred documented
lynchings in Mississippi alone.
Coming from Chicago, Curtis Jones and his cousin Emmett Till had little
sense of the world they were entering when they arrived in Money, Mississippi.
Emmett Till at the time, he was fourteen years old, had just graduated out of
grammar school.
He had some picture of white kids that he had graduate from.
That was you know, female and male.
So he told the boys down there, you know, that gather around the store
so they must have been around about maybe ten to twelve, you know
youngsters around there. That the girls was his girlfriend, you know.
So one of the local boys said hey, there's a girl in that store there.
He said "I bet you won't go in there and talk to her."
So he went in there to get some candy.
So when he was leaving out the store, after buying the candy,
he told her to say, "bye baby."
And the next thing I know, one of the boys came up to me and said, "Say man,
"you got a crazy cousin. He just went in there and said bye to that white woman."
And that's when this man I was playing checkers with this older man,
I guess he must have been around about sixty or seventy.
He jumps straight up and say "Boy, say y'all about to get out of here,
"that lady will come out of that store and blow your brains off."
♪ (woman vocalizing)♪
- This is Moses Wright. I am the uncle of Emmitt Lewis Till.
Sunday morning, about two-thirty, someone called at the door,
and I said, "Who is it?"
And he said "This is Mr. Bryant. I want to talk with you and the boy."
And when I open this door, that was a man standing with
a pistol in one hand and a flashlight in the other hand. And he asked me,
"Did I have two boys, that are from Chicago?"
I told him, I have.
And he said "I want it, I want the boy that done all that talk".
Then marched him to the car, and they asked someone there
"Well this is the right boy?" And the answer was, "Yeah."
And they drove toward Money.
- Four days later, Emmitt Till's body was found in the Tallahatchie River.
- His body was so badly damaged that we couldn't hardy just tell who he was,
but he happened to have on a ring with his initial.
And that cleared it up.
- The body was shipped home, back north to Chicago,
where Mamie Till Bradley insisted on an open casket funeral.
"So all the world can see," she said, "what they did to my boy."
♪ (somber music) ♪
Jet Magazine showed Till's corpse.
Beaten, mutilated, shot through the head.
An entire generation of young, Black people would remember
the horror of that photo.
♪ (somber music) ♪
Roy Bryant, husband of the woman in the store and J.W, Milam,
her brother in law, were arrested for the murder of Emmitt Till.
The trial was held in nearby Sumner, Mississippi.
Black organizations like the NAACP and The Black Press worked especially hard
to keep the case in the news, to make an example of
southern racism for the world.
- I cover the courts in many areas of this country, but
the Till case was unbelievable. I mean I just didn't get the sense
of being a courtroom.
It was, first place segregated.
The Black Press sat at a bridge table far off from the court and
the boy's mother came down. They sat her there,
at the bridge table with us.
- What do you intend to do here today?
- To answer any questions that the attorneys might ask me to answer.
- How do you think it's possible to be of help to them?
- I don't know. I mean just by answering any questions that they ask me.
- Do you have any evidence bearing on this case.
- I do know that this is my son.
- The defense argued that the body found tied to the cotton gin fan in the river
was so disfigured that it could not be identified as Emmett Till.
The trial took five long, hot days.
The prosecution star witness was Till's uncle, Moses Wright,
who testified despite threats to his life.
- He was called up on too.
Could he see anybody in the courtroom identified anybody in that courtroom
that come to his house that night and got the Emmett Till out.
He stood up and there was a tension in the courtroom
and he says in his broken language, "Dar he."
- Dar he. There he is.
- I really didn't realize how brave my grandfather Moss Wright was,
but after I got older I realized that he was a brave man.
He was a mighty brave man to travel back down there, you know,
among all those hostile peoples and testify, get up in court
and point his finger at a white man and accuse him of murder.
- As the trial ended, a defense lawyer told the jury he was quote,
"Sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men."
It took the jury an hour to find the men not guilty.
(clapping and cheering)
Months later, for a fee of $4,000, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam
told their story to reporter William Bradford Huie.
- Milam was startled at the belligerent attitude or the fact that young Till
didn't appear to be afraid of him.
He'd gone and gotten him out of bed and had him in the back of the truck
and young Till never realized the danger he was in.
I'm quite sure that he never thought these two men would kill him.
Or maybe he just in such a strange environment,
he really just doesn't know what he's up against.
And it seems to the rational mind today that it seems impossible
that they could have killed him.
But J. W. Milam looked up at me and said, well when he told me
about this white girl he had he says, "My friend this war's about done in now,"
he says, "that's what we have to fight to protect."
And he says, I just looked at him and I said, "Boy you ain't
"going to ever see the sun come up again."
- I believe that the whole United States is mourning with me.
And if the death of my son could mean something to the other
unfortunate people all over the world then for him to have died a hero
would mean more to me than for him to have just died.
- The fact that the Emmett Till young Black man could be found
floating down the river in Mississippi as indeed many had been done over the years,
just set in concrete the determination of people to move forward.