Emmett Till 'Still Remembered'

He was among the "Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees."

NOTE: I wrote this essay in February 2017 after reading a newspaper article about Emmett Till, namely that his accuser, Carolyn Bryant, had admitted in an interview to a writer (who was publishing a book on this famous episode) that some of the more sensational accusations she made about her encounter with the young teenager did not happen.

There was a recent effort by civil rights activists to have Bryant charged for her role in what happened Emmett Till, but authorities declined to do so. It was Bryant’s then husband and brother-in-law who kidnapped and murdered Till based on this encounter. Bryant, however, died in April of this year, making any prosecution a moot point.

Also, earlier this year, the movie ‘Till’ was released to much critical acclaim. The plot is based on the true story of Mamie Till-Bradley, an educator and activist from Chicago who pursued justice after the murder of her 14-year-old son who was abducted, tortured, and murdered in 1955. She would be instrumental in keeping the story of his murder alive, and her fierce advocacy proved to be a catalyst for the civil rights movement.

Finally, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation this past July 25th, on what would have been Till’s 82nd birthday, designating a national monument in both his and his mother’s honor. The monument will include three sites, one in Illinois at the church where his funeral was held and the other two in Mississippi, including where the young teen’s body was pulled from the river and at the courthouse where his killers were tried and acquitted.

So here is the piece from six years ago.

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   When I was 21, I bought a Billie Holiday album. Among the songs on it was ‘Strange Fruit,’ a piece Lady Day sang in a brooding, melancholy voice. Of course, as a blues singer, that could describe a lot of her offerings on this record.

    I did not play the record too often and, when I did, I apparently did not listen too attentively. Eventually, it dawned on me that the lyric “Strange fruit hangin' from the poplar trees" referred to black men and women dangling from those Southern trees with ropes around their necks—the hapless victims of a lynch mob.

     I thought of this once-common and for many people once-acceptable form of domestic terror when I read a recent newspaper article, reporting on a new development in the long-ago murder of a young black man.

    That young man was Emmett Till, who was 14 at the time. He was not lynched, but that might have been an easier way to go. Instead he was severely beaten, tortured if you will, before finally being shot in the head and dumped into a river. Unfortunately for his killers, fishermen found the battered body a few days later.

   The incident occurred in 1955. Emmett, who was from Chicago, was visiting relatives in rural Mississippi when he allegedly made lewd remarks and sexual advances to a 21-year-old white woman, working in a grocery store. Her name at that time was Carolyn Bryant. Remarried, it’s now Carolyn Donham.

     The woman’s then husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother, J.W. Milam, were arrested for the murder and put on trial.  Both were acquitted by the all-white, all-male jury.

  Maybe the ‘not guilty’ verdicts were reasonable, based on the evidence presented in the trial. Maybe, as many feel, it was a travesty of justice.

    The problem was that, even if the evidence pointed to their guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” white juries in the South had a history of exonerating white men accused of killing or otherwise committing a crime against a black person. The men’s acquittal—in the eyes of many blacks and sympathetic whites--seemed to fit this pattern.

    In the trial, Donham (according to the article) testified that Emmett “had grabbed her, and, in profane terms, bragged about his history with white women.”

  A historian, Timothy B. Tyson, who has written a book “The Blood of Emmett Till” that is now on sale, told the Associated Press that “Carolyn Donham broke her long public silence in an interview with him in 2008” and admitted to him that she had given false testimony about Emmett making “physical and verbal threats.”

    In another interview, Tyson claimed that “She said with respect to the physical assault on her, or anything menacing or sexual, that that part isn’t true.”

    The historical account I read indicated that the young teenager had also been accused (by Donham) of whistling at her. Other young blacks with him, including his cousin, were not sure the whistle was aimed at her or that he had done so for some other reason. His mother, later on, in questioning the claims that he’d made the threats, noted that he stuttered and had difficulty talking.

    A whistle or even lewd remarks are, of course, not a capital offense. But given the social norms of Jim Crow South at that time, and in the decades before the mid-1950s, even a seemingly minor offense, a black person not showing proper deference or behaving in what was seen by whites in a surly manner, could have dire consequences—even for a 14-year-old youngster. For a number of them, the consequence was becoming “strange fruit” hanging from a tree.

    According to the historian, Donham also told him, “Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.”

  The newspaper story recalled that the two men charged with the murder, in an interview with Look magazine not long afterwards, admitted that they’d killed the young black man.

    Emmett Till’s murder became a famous, landmark event, in large part, because his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, chose to have an open casket “so all the world can see what they did to my boy.”

    The photos of his disfigured and battered face, published in the black-owned press in Chicago and other major northern cities, caused outrage. Thousands of people filed past his casket. The trial drew lots of press coverage.

    The racially-motivated murder, the details of the incident, the trial and its outcome became a rallying cry that would galvanize the civil rights movement.

    Over 60 years later, Emmett Till, and what happened to him, is still remembered. The interest that’s resulted from this latest development in his case attests to the power of that memory. His life, cut short by a violent act, mattered then. It still matters.

Steve Horton is a mid-Michigan journalist and editor-publisher of the Fowlerville New & Views—a weekly newspaper.