BY STU SINGER  
This documentary film was premiered to a packed audience at the Schomburg Library in Harlem December 12. It reports the events around the lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Black youth from Chicago who was spending part of the summer of 1955 with relatives in a town in Mississippi, where he was tortured and murdered by racists.

The film is a powerful depiction of these events. The courageous response by his mother, Mamie Till, a Chicago city worker; his uncle, Moses Wright, a Mississippi sharecropper; Willie Reed, a young sharecropper, and others led to protest meetings involving tens of thousands of people throughout the country. Those meetings were still taking place 100 days after Emmett Till’s death when E.D. Nixon and Rosa Parks began the protests in Montgomery, Alabama, that became the Montgomery bus boycott. With the struggle in Montgomery, the civil rights movement, which had its beginnings in World War II, rapidly grew into the mass struggle that over 15 years broke the back of the system of legal segregation in the South known as Jim Crow.

On Aug. 24, 1955, after working in the fields, Emmett Till and some other young people piled into a pickup trick and went to a store for snacks in the small rural town of Money, Mississippi. According to a cousin interviewed in the film, Emmett whistled at the young white woman behind the counter, Carolyn Bryant, who ran the store with her husband Roy Bryant.

Three days later, Roy Bryant and his brother, J.W. Milam, went to the house of Moses Wright, Emmett Till’s uncle, where the teenager was staying. They kidnapped Emmett and threatened to kill anybody who talked about it. They pistol-whipped him with .45s, shot him in the head, tied a 75-pound fan around his neck with barbed wire, and threw his body into the Tallahatchie River.  
 
Refused to be intimidated
The story is that of ordinary people who stood up and refused to be intimidated and let this crime pass. A hero--not just a victim--that emerged was Emmett Till himself, just turned 14. His actions came to light from an unlikely source: the confession of his killers. They had admitted kidnapping him but, in court, denied killing him and were acquitted by an all-white jury. Because juries were selected from a list of male registered voters, and no Blacks were registered to vote in Tallahatchie County in 1955, the jury was, inevitably, all white and all male. The killers were never even charged for the kidnapping.

After the trial, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant admitted the killing and described it in detail in an interview with writer William Bradford Huie published in the January 24, 1956 issue of Look magazine (Huie paid them $4,000). "We were never able to scare him. They had filled him so full of that poison he was hopeless," one of the killers said.

They said Emmett Till told them, "You bastards, I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are. I’ve had white women. My grandmother was a white woman."

Milam, who pulled the trigger, told Huie, "Well, what else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully; I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers-- in their place--I know how to work ‘em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and I can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place."

In a January 23, 1956, editorial the Militant stated, "Whether the details are accurate or not, this explanation from Milam and Bryant is important.... In their eyes and in the eyes of the rich and powerful few who profit from the Jim Crow system in the South, and of the demoralized and depraved who follow them, a Negro who is not afraid, who believes he is equal, is a poisoned enemy who must be destroyed."

It adds, "Fighters for human dignity are the finest things a nation can produce. Precisely these fighters, who refused to scare, were victims of the recent wave of violence in the South." The Militant reported on the lynchings of civil rights fighters that were spreading.

In spite of the threats, Moses Wright reported that his nephew had been kidnapped. Mamie Till in Chicago immediately contacted the news media and officials demanding her son be found.

The body was found in the river. Bryant and Milam admitted taking Emmett Till, but said they had let him go. They were arrested and charged with murder.

As Mamie Till explains in the film, the coffin containing Emmett Till’s body came back to Chicago nailed shut and she was instructed not to open it. She told the funeral home that if they didn’t open it, she would get a hammer and do it herself.

She saw the horribly beaten body of her son. "I said, let the people see what I’ve seen."  
 
50,000 file by the open coffin
Fifty thousand people in Chicago filed by the coffin. The photograph of the body appeared first in the nationally circulated magazine, Jet, and then in publications throughout the world. You understand the impact it had when you see the movie.

The lead headline in the Sept. 12, 1955, issue of the Militant was, "14-year Old Negro Boy Lynched in Mississippi By White Supremacists; Body Sent to Chicago; Huge Crowds Gather In Dramatic Protest." The protest movement around the Emmett Till lynching remained on the front page of the Militant every week for months.

Many scenes documented in the movie are notable: The crowds outside the Chicago funeral home; Moses Wright standing up in court and pointing out the killers--the first time a Black man had testified against a white man in a Mississippi court in nearly a century; Mamie Till speaking at mass meetings throughout the country.

The film also shows the killers holding their young children on their knees during the trial. A coworker told me his wife recently saw a play about Emmett Till. To her, that was one of the most disturbing scenes--the depiction of children in the courthouse being trained on their parents’ knees to accept and support the racist brutality being committed against Black people.

As the film shows, the sheriff, a local plantation owner, jailed and threatened potential prosecution witnesses. At the trial, Mamie Till, Rep. Charles Diggs from Detroit--one of the few Black congressmen--and Black observers, photographers and journalists, were forced to sit at a card table in the corner of the room. Crowds of racists jeered them every day outside the courthouse. The sheriff contemptuously said, "hello niggers," as he walked by their table. The chairs they sat on were stolen every time they left the court room and they had to stand part of the time.

Both Moses Wright and Willie Reed, a young sharecropper who testified that he saw the killers with Emmett Till, had to be smuggled out of Mississippi, where they would have been killed.

The defense lawyers for the murderers argued that Emmett Till was not dead, that the body pulled from the river was someone else, even though Mamie Till and others had identified the body and Emmett Till’s father’s engraved ring was still on his hand. His father, part of a segregated army unit, was killed in World War II.

The all-white jury took one hour to acquit Bryant and Milam. Mamie Till led the congressman and others away from the courthouse before the jury came back, knowing there would be a victory rally for the killers. "It was like the fourth of July," she said.  
 
Inaction of federal government
The front page of the October 17 Militant demanded: "Immediate federal intervention!" and asked, "How many more lynchings, beatings, floggings and kidnappings must we have before the federal government acts to protect the Negro people of Mississippi? ...When big business wanted to intervene in the Korean civil war on the side of the landlords and Syngman Rhee’s dictatorship, hundreds of thousands of American boys were mobilized by Truman for ‘police action’ against the workers and farmers of Korea. But for the protection of one million Negroes in Mississippi, living under a reign of racist terror, the federal government has not lifted a finger."

In 1955 the United States was in the midst of an antilabor, anticommunist drive by the employers, and worldwide Washington was coming under heat for continued segregation. The Atlanta Constitution, a major liberal daily in the South, wrote concerning the Till case, "Once again the South has been rubber-stamped with a lynch-murder...grist in the mill of those who picture all the South as a region of violence. It assists the Communist propagandists. It conveys us into the hands of our enemies."

The movie reports how Mamie Till and thousands of others wrote President Dwight D. Eisenhower requesting federal action, but the White House never even acknowledged her request. Mississippi Democratic senator James Eastland is shown addressing a large rally. "You are not going to permit the NAACP to take over your schools," he declared. "You are not going to permit the NAACP to control your state."

In 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott and months after the Till lynching, Eastland was chosen to head the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Militant headline read, "Racists Handed Big Victory By Democrats in U.S. Senate." Just two years earlier, Trent Lott’s hero, segregationist Strom Thurmond, had been elected to the Senate.

When an all-white grand jury announced November 9 it would not file charges against Bryant and Milam for kidnapping, the Militant wrote, "Arrogant Racists Free Till Killers On Kidnap Count; Lynch Tide Mounts All Over South." Sixteen-year-old John Earl Reese of Longview, Texas was killed when racist thugs shot up the Black community there. Howard Bromley, 23, was killed with impunity by a white shopkeeper in Heathsville, Virginia. The Militant demanded, "Send federal troops to Mississippi."

Eisenhower finally did send federal troops two years later to Little Rock, Arkansas, to enforce school desegregation. And in 1962 President John F. Kennedy sent troops to Mississippi after the governor provoked a riot to stop James Meredith from entering the University of Mississippi.  
 
Rise of civil rights movement
The lynch mobs were still active, but now protests answered the lynchings. And the civil rights mobilizations grew larger and started to hit every city and town. Jim Crow’s days were numbered.

In Mississippi the turning point came in the summer of 1966. Some national civil rights leaders were giving up on that state, but James Meredith, who in 1962 became the first Black student at the University of Mississippi, started a march down Highway 51 from Memphis through the length of Mississippi. Racists attacked him, but he kept marching and others joined in. By the time the march reached Tougaloo, a Black college north of Jackson, there were thousands of demonstrators and international attention focused on the confrontation.

The march went into Jackson. The capitol building was surrounded by armed state cops, all white, but the march bypassed the capitol and poured into the downtown streets and the Black community. Those of us who were there will never forget it. The doors of nearly every home in the Black community were thrown open. Groups of people went around to restaurants, hotels, and stores and desegregated them on the spot.

Watching The Murder of Emmett Till gives a vivid picture of a decisive chapter in the history of the Black struggle. You see some of the fighters who seem to emerge from nowhere and put their lives on the line. A movement grew up against seemingly insurmountable odds and won.

Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till, who just died on January 6 at the age of 81, was one example of these fighters. Though she was suffering from kidney failure, she continued speaking around the country, right until the end, about her son’s lynching. "People have told me to let this thing die, even people in my own family," she said. "But people need to be aware."

See this film with coworkers and young people and talk about what it says about the real history of workers and farmers and the capacities they will demonstrate in the battles to come. It is a source of confidence for rebel youth and fighters today, here and throughout the world.  
 
 
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