Emmett Till Quotes

Somewhere between the fact we know and the anxiety we feel is the reality we live.”5

Some aweful things happened to a Negro kid named Emmett Till, and I was right in the middle of it,smack in the heart of crazy, senseless hatred.

I'm too old to be ignorant as I am." --Twelve-year-old Gabriella to the general, who does not want her to know about Emmett Till and the world's brutality.

There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts—the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother's face.

Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.

Some things are worse than death... If a man lives, he must still live with himself.

A quiet snowglobe of pain I want to shake. While the flakes fall like ash we race the train to reach the place Emmett Till last whistled or smiled or did nothing.

The actual tragedy of Emmett Till, he had told her once, was not the murder of a black child for whistling at a white woman but that some black people thought: But why did you whistle?

There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts--the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother's face.

I couldn’t articulate how the name made me feel. Shawn had meant it to humiliate me, to lock me in time, into an old idea of myself. But far from fixing me in place, that word transported me. Every time he said it—“Hey Nigger, raise the boom” or “Fetch me a level, Nigger”—I returned to the university, to that auditorium, where I had watched human history unfold and wondered at my place in it. The stories of Emmett Till, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King were called to my mind every time Shawn shouted, “Nigger, move to the next row.” I saw their faces superimposed on every purlin Shawn welded into place that summer, so that by the end of it, I had finally begun to grasp something that should have been immediately apparent: that someone had opposed the great march toward equality; someone had been the person from whom freedom had to be wrested. I did not think of my brother as that person; I doubt I will ever think of him that way. But something had shifted nonetheless. I had started on a path of awareness, had perceived something elemental about my brother, my father, myself. I had discerned the ways in which we had been sculpted by a tradition given to us by others, a tradition of which we were either willfully or accidentally ignorant. I had begun to understand that we had lent our voices to a discourse whose sole purpose was to dehumanize and brutalize others—because nurturing that discourse was easier, because retaining power always feels like the way forward.

Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin instructs, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”24

In conclusion, here's my advice to aspiring writers, journalists, and future lawyers - or anyone planning on working in the communications field: if you want an accurate account of any story, go to the primary sources. They know what really happened.

The ruthless attack inflicted injuries almost certain to be fatal. They reveal a breathtaking level of savagery, a brutality that cannot be explained without considering rabid homicidal intent or a rage utterly beyond control. Affronted white supremacy drove every blow.

We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy.

How many others have there been that you and I will never hear about? How many Black hearts were violently stopped between Emmett Till and George Floyd? Away from crowds and before cell phone cameras?

I once posted a picture of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black boy who was murdered for whistling at a white woman in 1955. His mutilated body didn’t look human. Hailey texted me immediately after, freaking out. I thought it was because she couldn’t believe someone would do that to a kid. No. She couldn’t believe I would reblog such an awful picture. Not long after that, she stopped liking and reblogging my other posts.

seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend. In “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. writes that his worst enemies are not the members of Citizens’ Councils or the Ku Klux Klan but “the white moderate” who claims to support the goals of the movement but deplores its methods of protest and deprecates its timetable for change: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”10

When white feminism ignores history, ignores that the tears of white women have the power to get Black people killed while insisting that all women are on the same side, it doesn't solve anything. Look at Carolyn Bryant, who lied about Emmett Till whistling at her in 1955. Despite knowing who had killed him, and that he was innocent of even the casual disrespect she had claimed, she carried on with the lie for another fifty years after his lynching and death

I had seen a photograph of Emmett Till's body just after it was pulled from the river. I had seen photographs of white folks standing in a circle roasting something that had talked to them in their own language before they tore out its tongue.

It is not that I dwell on the past. But the past shapes the way we are in the present and the way we will become what we are destined to become. It is only because I have finally understood the past, accepted it, embraced it, that I can fully live in the moment. And hardly a moment goes by when I don’t think about Emmett, and the lessons a son can teach a mother.

Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn’t have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.

Things have come a long way in Mississippi. That’s the usual shorthand. Perhaps nowhere else in America has made more progress in its race relations, but then again, nowhere else had so far to go. Mississippi had the most lynchings, the worst Klan violence, the staunchest resistance to the civil rights movement. When the Emmett Till case was tried, the all-white jury found the two defendants not guilty in an hour and eight minutes. One juror said it would have been quicker if they hadn’t taken a break to drink Coca-Colas. Those days are gone now, but inevitably, they bleed through and stain the present.

We do not recognize the body Of Emmett Till. We do not know The boy’s name nor the sound Of his mother wailing. We have Never heard a mother wailing. We do not know the history Of this nation in ourselves. We Do not know the history of our- Selves on this planet because We do not have to know what We believe we own.

What does it mean when you remember something that you know never happened?

Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as “the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.

It was like watching a community you thought you knew reveal itself as something else.

Lord you gave your only son to remedy a condition, but who knows but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.

We must look at the facts squarely, not to flounder in a bitter nostalgia of pain but to redeem a democratic promise rooted in the living ingredients of our own history.

Emmett Till's death was an extreme example of the logic of America's national racial caste system. To look beneath the surface of these facts is to ask ourselves what our relationship is today to the legacies of that caste system - legacies that still end the lives of young African Americans for no reason other than the color of their American skin and the content of our national character. Recall that Faulkner, asked to comment on the Till case when he was sober, responded, 'If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't.' Ask yourself whether America's predicament is really so different now.

Frederick Sullens, editor of the Jackson Daily News, predicted, “If a decision is made to send Negroes to school with white children, there will be bloodshed. The stains of that bloodshed will be on the Supreme Court steps.”68

The graphic photographs of Emmett Till’s brutalized body after it was retrieved three days later, flashed across the screen,” says Baker. “I sprang off the couch and screamed ‘No!’ It was the immediate and universal anguish every mother feels at the sight of such cruelty to a child. My heart was broken wide open, and from that moment, I began reviewing how, decade by decade, I had unconsciously been consuming racism my whole life. I read and wrote and read and wrote. And that was the beginning of my journey.

Look at Carolyn Bryant, who lied about Emmett Till whistling at her in 1955. Despite knowing who had killed him, and that he was innocent of even the casual disrespect she had claimed, she carried on with the lie for another fifty years after his lynching and death. Though her family says she regretted it for the rest of her life, she still sat on the truth for decades and helped his murderers walk free. How does feminism reconcile itself to that kind of wound between groups without addressing the racism that caused it?

The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam’s and Bryant’s acquittals: “The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don’t want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.

Emmett Till's name still catches in my throat, like syllables waylaid in a stutterer's mouth. A fourteen-year-old stutterer, in the South to visit relatives and to be taught the family's ways. His mother had finally bought that White Sox cap; she'd made him swear an oath to be careful around white folks. She'd told him the truth of many a Mississippi anecdote: Some white folks have blind souls. In his suitcase she'd packed dungarees, T-shirts, underwear, and comic books. She'd given him a note for the conductor, waved to his chubby face, wondered if he'd remember to brush his hair. Her only child. A body left to bloat.

I knew that I could talk for the rest of my life about what happened to my baby, I could explain it in great detail, I could describe what I saw laid out there on that slab at A. A. Rayner’s place, one piece, one inch, one body part at a time. I could do all of that and people would still not get the full impact. . . . They had to see what I had seen. The whole nation had to bear witness to this.

So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building - 'Equal Justice Under Law' - can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955.

When we blame those who brought about the brutal murder of Emmett Till, we have to count President Eisenhower, who did not consider the national honor at stake when white Southerners prevented African Americans from voting; who would not enforce the edicts of the highest court in the land, telling Chief Justice Earl Warren, 'All [opponents of desegregation] are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big, overgrown Negroes.' We must count Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., who demurred that the federal government had no jurisdiction in the political assassinations of George Lee and Lamar Smith that summer, thus not only preventing African Americans from voting but also enabling Milam and Bryant to feel confident that they could murder a fourteen-year-old boy with impunity. Brownell, a creature of politics, likewise refused to intervene in the Till case. We must count the politicians who ran for office in Mississippi thumping the podium for segregation and whipping crowds into a frenzy about the terrifying prospects of school desegregation and black voting. This goes double for the Citizens' Councils, which deliberately created an environment in which they knew white terrorism was inevitable. We must count the jurors and the editors who provided cover for Milam, Bryant, and the rest. Above all, we have to count the millions of citizens of all colors and in all regions who knew about the rampant racial injustice in America and did nothing to end it. The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: 'The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.

But as I reflected on what the president could have done or said differently, I also remembered what it felt like in the weeks following 9/11. When, for a few glorious weeks, we were all united as Americans. For a brief time, it didn’t seem to matter if you were black, white, or brown. We were all brothers and sisters because we were Americans. We shared certain values, a certain past, a certain goal. We haven’t really seen that since. Charlottesville, I knew, had the same potential to unite us. But Trump’s response derailed that opportunity. America didn’t need a stock statement. The country was pleading for a serious discussion about race, about our fundamental need to completely stamp out the Klan and neo-Nazis. I couldn’t help but think of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing and the Charleston church shooting. Emmett Till and Jimmie Lee Jackson. Black Codes and the Southern Manifesto. Trump, I felt, had betrayed black America. And Jewish America. And American decency.

Kellum reminded the jury that special prosecutor Robert Smith, “a gentleman I don’t know,” would have the final argument, and that this was a powerful advantage. He then closed with a dramatic message that the jury’s verdict would have eternal consequences. I want you to think of the future. When your summons comes to cross the Great Divide, and, as you enter your father’s house—a home not made by hands but eternal in the heavens, you can look back to where your father’s feet have trod and see your good record written in the sands of time and, when you go down to your lonely silent tomb to a sleep that knows no dreams, I want you to hold in the palm of your hand a record of service to God and your fellow man. And the only way you can do that is to turn these boys loose.123

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Emmett recognized immediately that this passage from Emerson represented two things at once. First, it was an excuse. It was an explication of why, against all good sense, his father had left behind the houses and paintings, the memberships in clubs and societies in order to come to Nebraska and till the soil. Emmett’s father offered this page from Emerson as evidence—as if it were a divine decree—that he had had no choice.

These are the facts. But we are obliged to go beyond the facts of the lynching and grapple with its meaning. If we refuse to look beneath the surface, we can simply blame some Southern white peckerwoods and a bottle of corn whiskey. We can lay the responsibility of Emmett Till's terrible fate on the redneck monsters of the south and congratulate ourselves for not being one of them. We can also place, and over the decades many of us have placed, some percentage of the blame on Emmett, who should have known better, should have watched himself, policed his thoughts and deeds, gone more quietly through the Delta that summer. Had he only done so, he would have found his way back to Chicago unharmed. That we blame the murderous pack is not the problem; even the idea that we can blame the black boy is not so much the problem, though it carries with it several absurdities. The problem is why we blame them. We blame them to avoid seeing that the lynching of Emmett Till was caused by the nature and history of America itself and by a social system that has changed over the decades, but not as much as we pretend.

The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement.

Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin instructs, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.”13

Cassius Clay Jr., who was only six months younger, Emmett Till

The things that influenced my conduct as a Negro did not have to happen to me directly; I needed but to hear about them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness.

He was an innocent Black boy in Mississippi Minding his business, going to the store He became a Civil Rights movement icon Emmett Till’s spirit continues to roar This 14-year-old boy was lynched Because of a woman named Carolyn Bryant Who said that he flirted and whistled at her But it was a lie meant to help evil stir

Let’s show lots of love for Emmett Till And fight against bigotry, racism, and hate Let’s show lots of love for Emmett Till So humanity can have a better fate

Rosa Parks immediately thought of Emmett Till when she was on the bus She refused to get up when she remembered what he went through Evil will attack and say that you are helping to cause a fuss That’s why you have to see that it’s trying to distract you from what’s true

To accomplish this adaptation, racism first needed to be reduced to simple, isolated, and extreme acts of prejudice. These acts must be intentional, malicious, and based on conscious dislike of someone because of race. Racists were those white people in the South, smiling and picnicking at the base of lynching trees; store owners posting Whites Only signs over drinking fountains; and good ol’ boys beating innocent children such as Emmett Till to death. In other words, racists were mean, ignorant, old, uneducated, Southern whites. Nice people, well-intended people, open-minded middle-class people, people raised in the “enlightened North,” could not be racist.

I have lived my whole life as a Black man in the United States. I don't have to go all the way back to Tulsa and Rosewood and Emmett Till to know what it means for a white woman to accuse a Black man, and who would likely be believed. This was potentially a world of trouble heading my way. Her fingers were already dialing; in a split second of self-preservation, I considered that if I just stopped recording, maybe this would go away. Which of course was her intent. I can't say whether it was a conscious choice or the product of unconscious bias when she grabbed that bloody, blunt object, of the White Damsel in Distress Threatened by the Black Menace, to try to club me into compliance with her wish not to be recorded; I don't know her at all, can't know why it was so easily within her reach, when she was grasping for something to give her leverage in our confrontation. In the weeks that followed, several right-wing mouthpieces would seek to excuse it, justifying her injection of race into the situation as merely her giving a full and accurate physical description of me to the police. (Never mind the falseness of the accusation in the first place.) Except at that moment, she wasn't speaking to the police; she was talking to me. People who think their life is in danger don't pause to inform their supposed assailant, in a rather triumphal tone of voice, that they're about to call the cops and inform them of your race; if they're genuinely scared for their life, they punch the digits, period. Her intent, in saying it to me, was to use the long history of Fear the Black Man, and the resulting unjust police violence against us, to intimidate me into submission.

When Gloster Current worried that Mamie might be absent, perhaps due to her recent bout with exhaustion, he instructed organizers to schedule her last on the program and to get donations before her speech. In case she did not show, he reasoned, “you do not have to make the announcement until after you have taken up the collection.”98 That

Reporter James Hicks also began a riveting four-part series in both the Cleveland Call and Post and Baltimore Afro-American. Hicks enthralled readers with his blow-by-blow account of the trial and his role in the dramatic search for witnesses

The large, bold headline on the front page of the Sunset edition on Friday said it all: “TILL’S DAD RAPED 2 WOMEN, MURDERED A THIRD IN ITALY.” The accompanying article, naming the murdered woman as Anna Zanchi and the two assaulted women as Benni Lucretzia and Freida Mari, noted that Louis Till was tried on February 17, 1945, and hanged four and a half months later on July 2.116 An

Hicks next told them what was most relevant in justifying a federal probe. Should the FBI send an agent to the jail at Charleston, he should talk to an inmate named Sarah, who “will tell you that during the Sumner murder trial when Sheriff H. C. Strider was saying that he could not locate Too Tight Collins, actually Collins was at that time locked up in the Charleston jail.” Sarah, according to Hicks, was granted various privileges at the jail for performing sexual favors for the inmates as well as for Strider.

Medgar Evers certainly felt that way and told his wife, Myrlie, how furious he was that rather than help Mamie, the association “used her” to advance its cause.

Citizens’ Councils, founded in Mississippi eighteen months earlier in response to the Brown decision.

Nixon, however, proposed one way out of the dilemma by suggesting they push the issue on to Congress. If a bill came out of a congressional investigation, southern Democrats would certainly filibuster it, allowing the administration to save face while forcing the Democrats to deal with the fallout. Both Brownell and Dulles liked this idea.3

The story had been in the making for three months. The author was William Bradford Huie, a forty-five-year-old nationally known journalist, author, and television personality from Hartselle, Alabama.

Tragedy preceded the verdict when Beulah Melton’s car went off the road and into a bayou on a dark night four days before the trial began. She drowned, but the two children who were with her were rescued, just in time to join their two other siblings as orphans. The drowning was ruled an accident, the sheriff surmising that because Beulah was a new driver, she probably lost control of the car.12 Others believed that someone close to Kimbell intentionally ran her off the road. Regardless, it was clear by the verdict that in the six months since Emmett Till’s killing, things had not changed in the Mississippi Delta.

Emmett Till’s murder” instilled in Anne Moody, a fourteen-year-old black girl from Alabama, “the fear of being killed just because I was black.” It was the senselessness of the murder of the fourteen-year-old boy that she couldn’t get out of her mind, she was to say. “I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.

Turns out, it was a North Hill tradition started by Grandpop after a fourteen-year-old black boy named Emmett Till was killed for whistling at a white woman when Grandpop was younger.

In the South’s calculation it took only “one drop” of black blood to make a person black.

In August of 1955, Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black Chicago youth, visited a small town in the Delta country of Mississippi. The teenager entered a country store where a white woman accused him of whistling at her. Within a day Till was dead, so savagely beaten that it was beyond the ability of his mother to recognize her son. Two white men were arrested: Roy Bryant, the husband of the white woman, and his brother, J. W. “Big Milam.” An all-white jury quickly found the defendants not guilty, and they were released. The two men immediately provided an interview for Look magazine in which they openly admitted to and bragged about committing the crime.

It was wrong. It was wrong to pay the same dime yet have to walk to the back of the bus. It was wrong to have to pass a "white" school to go to a "colored" school. It was wrong to have Colored and White signs. It was wrong that Emmett Till was murdered. It was wrong that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was dynamited. It was wrong that Medgar Evers was shot in the back and bled to death in his own driveway. And whatever was not right could be, if not corrected, then certainly reproved by people with kinder hearts, better minds and the courage to speak out for their beliefs.

Three days later when his body was found they wanted to bury him in Mississippi. I wanted him home in Chicago. I wanted the world to see what they did to my boy. I wanted Emmett's death to be the last death. I wanted Emmett's death to kill American innocence. I wanted Emmett's death to be not only the death of my boy but the death of innocence. I wanted Mississippi, I wanted America, to give us justice. And I prayed that I would live long enough to see it.

History was repeating itself. In 1955, two men who would admit to killing Emmett Till in an interview one year later were found not guilty by a jury of their peers. Just shy of sixty years later, the price of killing an unarmed innocent Black child continued to be the same—free of charge.

There was a date beneath the image: 1955. I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts—the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother’s face.

Long time ago. It was their daddies who killed Emmett Till back in the fifties,” Hayes said.

Sad to say that, in too many cases, people obviously were retelling the story for the wrong reasons. To make money, yes, but also to remake themselves.

We all knew what she really meant. She hated the abuse of power associated with race. She had learned just how race, gender, and social status all can be weaponized.

As Mamie had taught us all, we each have a purpose in life, something that sets us apart from every other person on the planet. The greatest joy we can experience is finding that purpose, living it.

We saw in just a couple of days how the media could begin to pass along a story that it seemed nobody ever checked out, but that everyone might believe regardless—amplifying the false information. There was a valuable lesson for me in all this. For some time, I had been saying that setting the record straight was one big part of our pursuit of justice in the case of Emmett Till. Now I could see very clearly how disinformation and misinformation were two sides of the same coin—public understanding.

After all, it was the story of Emmett Till that opened Patrick’s eyes and caused him to see the world differently, realizing the unifying themes of the story, a story that can bring us all together—across political and racial lines—in our commitment to shared values.

Black youngsters who walked through neighborhoods other than their own did so at their peril. Those searching for places to play, in parks and other public facilities, were especially vulnerable. These were lessons that black children growing up on the South Side learned with their ABCs.6

A quiet snowglobe of pain I want to shake. While the flakes fall like ash we race the train to reach the place Emmett Till last whistled or smiled or did nothing.

There are things that cannot be seen but must be.

One fellow officer said a group that had gotten inside the Capitol told him, “Put your gun down, and we’ll show you what kind of nigger you really are!” The irony of that moment was that more than seventy years after Sergeant Isaac Woodard—after the civil rights movement; after the deaths of Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, and others; after the Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional; after Black people’s continued service in every war; and after the election of an African American as president of the United States—we were just “niggers” to them, just like that Black veteran of World War II who had come home from war only to be beaten and blinded by white cops.

And I kept screaming, as the cameras kept flashing," [Mamie] wrote, "in one long, explosive moment that would be captured for the morning editions.

[The undertaker] asked if [Mamie] wanted him to retouch Emmett's body and make him look a little more presentable, "No," [she] said. That was the way [she] wanted him presented. "Let the world see what I have seen.

We can still hear the marching feet of millions in the streets of America, all of them belonging to the children of Emmett Till.

It is impossible to take a step without walking through a ghost. Every memory creates one. Every version of ourselves leaves a shadow behind. Every regret and every promise and every touch against the skin. The living houses of San Francisco know this--arms gripping the hem of the San Andreas Fault, The death fields around Wounded Knee know this, where every blade of grass and weed briar is poison to the touch. The Tallahatchie River knows, gone bone dry the day Emmett Till was pulled from the waters, The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory knows, and Columbine High School knows, and Ford's Theatre knows-- with their leviathan eyes, their mouth that lick familiar air and sigh. The land, inch by inch, brick by brick, is alive with remembering.

When I think about the history of slavery and racism in this country, I think about how quick we are to espouse notions of progress without accounting for its uncertain and serpentine path. I think of how decades of racial violence have shaped everything we see, but sometimes I find myself forgetting its impact on those right beside me. I forget that many of the men and women who spat on the Little Rock Nine are still alive. I forget that so many of the people who threw rocks at Dr. King are still voting in our elections. I forget that, but for the arbitrary nature of circumstance, what happened to Emmett Till could have happened to my grandfather. That the children who threw food at my grandmother and called her a nigger are likely bouncing their own great-grandchildren on their laps. That the people who lynched a man in my grandfather's town may have had children who inherited their parents' hatred. That the woman who stood alongside the Obamas to officially open the National Museum of African American History and Culture was the daughter of a man born into slavery. My grandfather's grandfather was born into slavery, while my grandmother's grandfather was born at its edge. We tell ourselves that the most nefarious displays of racial violence happened long ago, when they were in fact not so long ago at all. These images and videos that appall our twenty-first-century sensibilities are filled with people who are still among us. There are people still alive today who knew and held and loved people who were born into slavery. I do not misunderstand the language of progress. Though I realize that I do not yet have all the words to discuss a crime that is still unfolding. But I do know that spending the day with my grandparents in a museum documenting the systemic and interpersonal violence they witnessed the hand that beat them and the laws that said it was okay reminded me that in the long arc of the universe, even the most explicit manifestations of racism happened a short time ago.

That’s the actual tragedy,” Ifemelu said, and realized she was using Blaine’s own words; sometimes she heard in her voice the echo of his. The actual tragedy of Emmett Till, he had told her once, was not the murder of a black child for whistling at a white woman but that some black people thought: But why did you whistle?

I realized that Mother had been four years old in 1955, and with that realization, the distance between me and Emmett Till collapsed. My proximity to this murdered boy could be measured in the lives of people I knew. The calculation was not made with reference to vast historical or geological shifts—the fall of civilizations, the erosion of mountains. It was measured in the wrinkling of human flesh. In the lines on my mother’s face.

Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsip,

William Faulkner. A native of Oxford in Lafayette County, Faulkner argued in a September 9 UPI editorial written from Rome, Italy, that the Till murder was not just a local issue. The consequences were so wide that even the survival of America was at stake. Because the white race totaled only one-fourth of the world’s population, he argued, the rest of the world would not tolerate white America’s abuses of its minorities any longer. Would the United States survive another attack like Pearl Harbor if people throughout the world, who differ from its majority, either in skin color or ideology, were aligned against it? Talk about freedom means nothing if it does not include all of humanity, wrote Faulkner impassionedly. His conclusion was powerful and frank: Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Mississippi by two white adults on an afflicted Negro child is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don’t deserve to survive, and probably won’t.

This was certainly an allusion to a March 1, 1954, incident involving four Puerto Rican nationalists who fired thirty rounds from the Ladies Gallery in the US Capitol, wounding

Chatham’s impassioned arguments brought tears to the eyes of the black journalists, sitting on the right side of the courtroom. Even some white spectators were crying

reporter for the black press called Chatham’s remarks “one of the most passionate pleas ever made by a white man in the south on behalf of a Negro.

Minor also recalled that once Strider was in the legislature, he was not the same man that the world saw in Sumner during the Till murder trial. Although he is remembered for regularly insulting the black journalists in the hot, crowded courtroom in Sumner, his election to the Senate after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 forced him to deal with a black constituency that finally had the power of the ballot. Yet Strider would have been happy to rid the Delta of its black citizens. In February 1966, he cosponsored a bill to relocate Mississippi blacks to other states, as a new farm bill was making it harder for laborers to earn a living. A proposed relocation commission would seek federal funds for the removal of those who wanted to go. “If they (Negro farm workers) feel like they are put upon or have to live in tents and opportunities are brighter somewhere else, we’ll be glad to get them there,” said Strider’s cosponsor, Senator Robert Crook of Ruleville.96 Nothing ever came of the proposal, however.

On December 27, 1970, Strider died of a heart attack while on a deer hunt in Issaqueena County; his body was shortly discovered by others.

The simple obituary of J. W. Milam that appeared in 1980 escaped media attention. Roy Bryant’s death, which came in 1994, would have gone unnoticed as well had it not been for the astute eye of journalist Bill Minor. Minor published a piece that noted Bryant’s role in the Till case soon after the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and Bryant’s local paper, the Bolivar Commercial, each ran short, standard obituaries.117

Carolyn gave birth to her third son, Frankie Lee.

Roy’s mother, Eula Bryant.

When Roy, Carolyn, and the two youngest children left Louisiana in 1973 and returned to Mississippi, they relocated to Ruleville, in Sunflower County. Roy went back into the grocery business by taking over a small store that had been run by family members. Son Frank, a football player at North Sunflower Academy, earned his high school diploma in 1975. Carol Ann began attending the Mississippi School for the Deaf in Jackson, but spent every other weekend and holidays at home. She graduated in 1979.125 At some point, Roy and Carolyn Bryant’s marriage developed serious problems, and it became unbearable for Carolyn.

Perhaps Roy’s demons had concerned his mother because she had once endured similar abuses from her second husband, Henry Bryant.

Two months after Frank’s death, Carolyn put her home in Greenville up for sale and moved to Raleigh, North Carolina, to live with her surviving son, Lamar.

Lasting romantic love has eluded Carolyn, however. After her divorce from Roy Bryant in 1975, she remarried at least twice and had another relationship with a man (last name Wren), with whom she lived for a time. On November 21, 1984, she wed Greenville resident Griffin Chandler, an employee at US Gypsum. The marriage ended three and a half years later with Chandler’s death.144 The widowed Carolyn soon married again, this time to former Leland police officer David Donham.

In June 2010, Carolyn joined the social networking site Facebook, under the username “Granny Pike” (after her mother’s maiden name), which kept her actual identity hidden. In mid-2014, however, she was forced to close her account because strangers figured out who she was and began to harass her online. Five months after first joining Facebook, however, she both posed and answered the question as to what constitutes the real qualities in a man. Her answer was that he must be ethical and stand up for a good cause.