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