Why Not Give the Boy a Whipping and Leave it at That?

This town is absurdly misnamed.

Money, Mississippi is a dying place, a hamlet of poverty years past any concern about self-worth. Where we stand in Money should be an American shrine, a historical tourist must-see. But it is not.

I seek out non-descript locations that have momentous historical significance but are somehow relegated and folded into the small print of history, tucked away in the weeds of social neglect, unnoted and forgotten.  Money, MS is just such a place. We sanitize our well-known historical markers. The horror of the hand-to-hand combat on the fields at Shiloh, for example, is artificially softened by the immaculately gardened landscapes trampled by selfie snappers. It is different here. A raw evil resonates, absorbs and sticks to me. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I have never before had this unsettling sensation of repugnant awe.

Nearly every tentacle of the post-World War II Civil Rights movement somehow touches this tumbledown building we stand in front of. Made of cinder block, wood and brick, we here today to peer through its broken glass windows in a search for understanding of a brutal and senseless murder. A short and fat just turned 14-year-old black kid from Chicago affectionately known to his family as “Bobo,” 65 years ago lost his life for a simple miscalculation he made in this building.  We stare directly into eyes of the ghosts of past evil, Mississippi style. Bobo to history is known as Emmett Till.

1955

Like the crumbling exterior shells of its few still standing structures, Money is a community on life support. This is a town that by condoning evil has forever encapsulated its legacy in dishonor as much as if the town’s residents had collectively and actively participated in the horrific event itself.

Antiphrasis is the use of a word or phrase in a way that is opposite of what it really means, like nicknaming a fat man “Tiny,” or naming this stricken town “Money” - the more humorous the stretch the better.  Antiphrasis is suitable for both sarcasm and irony. When something does not register, it surprises people, making them stop and think about what is really meant.  My wife, Shawna, and I have followed this morning a parallel route of back road asphalt along the old Illinois Central railroad tracks to a point about 90 minutes south of Memphis. This rotting structure once housed the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market where local cotton field workers, both white and black, could purchase the popular staples of the 1950’s: Lucky Strike Cigarettes, Moon Pies, lye soap and Goode’s headache powder were sold here. In its heyday four Coca-Cola signs adorned the outside front of the building, alongside benches for daytime loafers and checker players.

Today

Emmitt Till was lynched because here where I gaze at the counter of what remains of the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market, he bought two cents worth of bubble gum and then wolf whistled at the 21-year-old white woman who had sold Till his snack. She clerked for the business owned by her and her 24-year-old husband. They lived in three rooms off the back of the store with their two small sons.

Till walked through these doors on August 24, 1955. He had been in Mississippi all of three days, visiting    a great uncle, Moses Wright, a cotton sharecropper and a part time preacher. In a few weeks he would return back to Chicago and enter the 9th grade. Till did not understand the ways of the 1955 Jim Crow South, the bone-numbing racism - an unending string of degradation: “keep your eyes down, your mouth shut and your pride in your pocket.” He would pay dearly for committing a Dixieland cultural taboo.

Till had accompanied several of his cousins to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy some candy. According to accounts, Emmett allegedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who owned the store.

Maurie Wright, 16, Emmett’s cousin, told the United Press in a report published Sept. 1, 1955: “Emmett went into the store and asked for some bubble gum and left after telling the women ‘Goodbye.’ Outside, Emmett gave a ‘wolf call.’ I told Emmett to be careful of what he said in the store.”

Emmett Till

On Aug. 28, 1955, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, paid a middle of the night visit to Emmett’s great-uncle’s home and demanded the boy. Neither local man made any attempt to conceal their identity. Milam had in his possession a five-cell flashlight and a Colt 45 handgun.

“Moses pleaded with the men to leave Emmett alone,” according to an online story in 2007 posted by PBS. "He's only 14, he’s from up North. Why not give the boy a whipping, and leave it at that?’” His wife, Elizabeth Wright, “offered money to the intruders, but they ordered her to go back to bed.”

Emmett’s uncle “led the men throughout his home with flashlights until they found Emmett in a bed, sleeping,” according to the PBS report. “They woke him up and told him to get dressed.”

Four days later, Emmett Till, Jr.’s nude body was pulled from the slime green waters of the Tallahatchie River, 12 miles upstream from Money at Pecan Point.

Not only had Till been murdered, but he had also been forced to undress, had the side of his face caved in by the blunt end of an axe, then was shot twice in the back of the head with a Colt 45. His lifeless body was bound to a 75-pound cotton gin wheel with barbed wire and tossed into the river. The lesson taught Till in southern chivalry was a harsh one.

The murder of Emmett Till has not historically registered with the nation’s concessions and sense of guilt like other more well-known civil rights clashes. Within the Mississippi and Alabama Delta cotton regions, it is probable not even in the top 10. The March on Selma, Bloody Sunday, the bombing of the Birmingham church and the three little girls who died, the attack dogs of Sherriff Bull Conner, the murder of the Freedom Riders in Philadelphia, MS, the Scottsboro Boys, James Meredith and Ole Miss, the Birmingham Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks and Governor George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door; all Mississippi Delta region events recorded in the nation’s archives ahead of the murder of Emmett Till. But, due to a heroic and brave decision by Till’s mother, no event more galvanized the noble cause of equality in mainstream white America like the murder of this 14-year-old boy. It was the key turning point in shifting the tide of the nation’s view of civil rights from denial to outrage.

The Accused and Wives

When Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley heard the news that her only child had been murdered, she insisted that authorities send his body home to Chicago. When she went to the train station to see the body of her son, she collapsed. “Lord, take my soul,” she cried. Emmett Till’s body was bloated beyond recognition. His teeth were missing. His ear was severed. His eyes were hanging out.

Unexpectedly, Till-Mobley demanded an open casket at his funeral. “I want the world to see what they did to my boy,” she explained. More than 50,000 people filed through a south side Chicago church to view the corpse. “Negro Boy Was Killed for ‘Wolf Whistle,’” a headline in Jet Magazine read. When the magazine printed photos of Emmett’s mangled corpse, it created national outrage, shocking America across color lines. Till’s death became a rallying cry for the movement like no atrocity before. And it was simply because a mother made the heart wrenching decision to open a casket so the world, “can see what they did to my son.”  

The grotesque image of the mutilated boy was a light in the dark to a nation in denial of the horrors of the racism of the day, then, now and for all time. The world had no choice but to take notice, could not ignore the rawness of the image and to recoil in collective outrage. It was a singular symbolic gesture that exploded and dwarfed previous years of less graphic mundane protests expressed in damnation of Jim Crow. A grieving nation asked how could any man think it was ok to do this to a 14-year-old boy who, maybe, made a passing kid-like come on to a woman?  

Till’s mother had been born and raised in rural Mississippi, moving to Chicago as a teenager in search of life away from the boiling toil in the sun of a Mississippi cotton field. Emmett was born in 1941, her only child with a local small time crook named Emmett Till. The senior Till joined the Army in 1943 and was sent to Europe. In 1945, he was court-martialed for the rape of a young German girl. The military hung him. Emmett Till, Sr. was buried and his remains today are still interred in Germany. Till, Jr. had no memories of his father.

Till-Mobley warned her son that Mississippi was a land dominated by the type of racism he had never experienced in his all-black Chicago south side neighborhood. She admonished him to obey his relatives.

“She told him ‘to be very careful … to humble himself to the extent of getting down on his knees,“  the media in 1955 was told by a relative. “Living in Chicago,” his mother testified at the trial of his murderers, "he didn’t know.”

Bryant and Milam were charged with murder and brought to trial on Sept. 19, 1955, in the county seat of Sumner, Mississippi.

Trial Jury - Not Guilty

After five lackluster days of prosecution and a wink to the jury by the defense, Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. The jury later reported they had taken about five minutes to agree on a unanimous not guilty verdict and then for appearance-sake spent about an hour discussing the weather and the upcoming World Series. One juror told the Jackson Chronicle, “We have to live here.” Today, their relatives have to live with the stigma of their infamous vote. The acquittal shocked the world.

Bryant and Miller, after their trial and with double jeopardy protection from any future prosecution, sold their stories to Look Magazine.  In its January 24, 1956, Look published their confessions.

In the magazine story, titled ‘The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,’  “the men detailed how they beat Till with a gun, shot him and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River with a heavy cotton-gin fan attached with barbed wire to his neck to weigh him down,” according to the website of the History Channel. “The two killers were paid a reported $4,000 for their participation in the article.”

Nearly 70 years later, the woman in the center of the controversy, now known as Carolyn Donham, revealed she lied about her interaction with Emmett. Timothy B. Tyson, a professor at Duke University who published the book “The Blood of Emmett Till” in 2017, wrote that in an interview, Donham told him that the boy did not make a sexual advance toward her. Her statement perjured her testimony decades before, when she told a grand jury looking to indict her husband and brother-in-law for the capital offense of murder, that Emmett had grabbed her waist and said crude things to her. She had made the charge, she now claimed, to appease her husband, who she said had abused her throughout their dysfunctional marriage.

Peering in the back Window

In 2004, the Justice Department reopened the case. In 2005, Emmett’s body was exhumed by the FBI and an autopsy was performed. But a grand jury decided not to seek indictments. No one was ever convicted in Emmett Till’s slaying.

“You’re looking at Mississippi. I guess it’s about the same way it was 50 years ago,” Emmett’s cousin Simeon Wright told the Associated Press in 2007. “We had overwhelming evidence, and they came back with the same decision. Some of the people haven’t changed from 50 years ago. Same attitude. The evidence speaks for itself. I don’t know how many years I have left on this Earth. We can leave this world and say: ‘Hey, we tried. We tried to get some justice in this, and we failed.’”