Emmett Till 1955

♪ 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.