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Books on
Emmett Till Murder
Death of Innocence /
A Death in the Delta /
The Lynching of Emmett Till /
Getting Away with Murder
Film
on Emmett Till Murder
The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till /
The Murder of Emmett Till
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A Response to Look Magazine's
"The
Shocking Story
of
Approved Killing in Mississippi"
By William Bradford Huie
The
Confessions of the Murderers of Emmett Till
By Amin
Sharif
I read the "Confessions"
of the killers of Till. It is a chilling account of how
peckerwoods in the South think and act. There is one
puzzling aspect of the "
Confessions" that I can't fathom. Why would any
young person raised in the south urge a (relative?)
young boy on to certain danger by daring him to try and
court a white woman. This doesn't ring true.
Bobo's mother tried
to instill in him how dangerous the South was. It is
quite possible that Bo would test the dangerous waters
of the Southland being from up North. But would a group
of young blacks, primarily black boys, raised under the
pall of white hot racism do such a thing? Remember,
these kids did not think of racism as some kind of
imaginary bogey man. They had seen the fear in the eyes
of their own fathers and grandfathers. Robert Johnson,
the blues singer, called white racism a hell hound bent
on tearing a black man to pieces. They-themselves-knew
what segregation meant.
There are several
other aspects of the "
Confessions" that I also find troubling. The idea
that Till was not afraid contradicts the earlier
statement that he "wanted to go home." The whole idea
that they were out to frighten Bo doesn't make sense.
When they entered his room in darkness, Bo had to be
frightened. He would have undoubtedly known that
something was up when his killers did not "whip" him on
the spot. He had most likely been infected by the fear
of those around him.
And why was Bo
still there anyway? The "
Confessions" says that Bo had been convinced by his
grandmother to stay--that the threat was overblown. But
who is more fearful of a white lynch mob. . . a black
woman or a black man? I believe it is the black woman.
She find herself deprived of the limited protection that
the black man offers if he is lynched. He is the buffer
between herself and white hot racism. It is the black
woman who feeds fear to black children with her breast
milk. It is she who always cautions the black man
against acting against the white man. Of course, she has
cause!
It is the black
woman who must bury the black man when his courage leads
him to confront the white man. She lives stigmatized by
the black man's action, her children, especially the
males are also stigmatized as sons of a "no good"
nigger. She lives everyday thinking that the "sins of
the father" will be visited upon the sons. After all,
the memory of the slave master is long. Just a few
thoughts. sharif
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A
Response to Sharif on the Look Confession
Brother Sharif, peace and
blessings,
I quite agree with
your perspective on the Look exposition of the "Confessions of the Murderers of Emmett Till." What
troubles me is not the twists and the lies of Roy Bryant
and J.W. Milam and the apology for the murder of Emmett
Till, but rather Look's editorial justification for its
payment of $4,000 to these two low-life murderers. They
begin their re-creation of the murderer's perspective by
claiming that they are presenting the "real story"—the "true account"—of the killing of Emmett Till. But
they do not know the truth; they know only the "truth"
of the murderers in that Look and its editors were not
eye-witnesses to the events that they assist the
murderers to construct..
They become
participants in the reconstruction of the murderers'
lies and justifications. Thus it is clear to me that the
Look story is another form of white persecution of the
fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, that these Look editors by a literary means continue to persecute and justify
their persecution of this fourteen-year old boy, and
worse, in the most shameless manner. If they wanted to
present the story of the murderers in an objective
manner they could have done so plainly and in a more
efficient manner by a simple question-and-answer
process, rather than by this dressed-up literary essay.
All we need do is
to look at the face of the murdered Emmett Till to
demonstrate that all of the things that these murderers
claim Emmett did before they put a bullet in his head is
an outrageous lie. But surely if we look at the "Letters
to the Editor" that this literary essay had its desired
effect—that is, to put a bit of salve on white
America's racial guilt.
But let us present
these "Confessions" to others and see what is their
reaction and what they think about the culpability of
Look magazine.
As ever and always, Rudy
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The story begins when handsome, 14-year-old, Emmett Till
of Chicago (born July 25, 1941), who when younger had
been a victim of polio, but who now as a strapping lad
whose only souvenir of his bout with polio was the
sometimes habit of stuttering, was granted permission to
visit his uncle Mose Wright, 64-year-old cotton farmer
in the small (350 population) magnolia state cotton
center of money Mississippi.
The visiting youth's vacation moved along nicely until
August 28, 1955, the fifth day of his visit.
In the company of several other youths, Emmett visited
Bryant's Grocery in Money and started a chain of events
that was later to focus the eyes of the nation and the
world upon Mississippi.
Following the discovery of the body the scene shifted to
Chicago, Illinois, where for three days some 50,000
persons viewed the youth's mutilated body. At the
funeral services the youth's mother, Mrs. Mamie Bradley
cried, "I hope my son didn't die in vain."
See also:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1969702
and
http://www.musarium.com/ws.html
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The Face of Emmett Till
(Updated) by Big Tex—So
I lived in southern Mississippi. Emmett Till,
this 14-year old black boy, who'd gone to
Tallahatchie County, Money, Mississippi in the
Delta, to visit his great uncle for summer
holiday, from Chicago, was lynched. And as a
child of 12, I can not remember having felt more
vulnerable, more frightened, more—but at the
same time more angry. And I can remember my
12-year old anger very, very much.And when I met
people like Judy and SNCC in 1962, '63, all of
us remembered the photograph of Emmett Till's
face, lying in the coffin, on the cover of
Jet Magazine. [...] And when I met Mrs.
Mamie Bradley, Emmett Till's mother, many years
later, I asked her, "Why did you not have the
undertaker do some cosmetic work on his face?"
And her response was that, "I wanted the world
to see what they did to my baby."—
Joyce Ladner
Confessions of the
Killers of Emmett Till |
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You know, I remember in
interviewing people in the course of doing [Eyes on
the Prize] that it was not only young black people
who spoke about Till, but young white people as well,
who had the idea that this is someone our age, you know,
a pre-teen really, or young teen, and if you can see
that happening to a young black child down in
Mississippi, it's not only black kids who say, ‘Well,
it's not that I can't be the teacher or nurse, but if
they kill people, this is serious," and that young white
people also said, "If they're killing people, it's not
just a matter of some folks don't like colored people,
this is horrible, and this can't be allowed to go on.
I've got to do something about this.”—Juan
Williams
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The
Death of Emmett Till
By Bob Dylan
'Twas down in
Mississippi not so long ago,
When a young boy from Chicago town walked
through a
Southern door.
This boy's fateful tragedy you should all
remember well,
The color of his skin was black and his name
was Emmett Till.
Some men they dragged him to a barn and
there they beat him up.
They said they had a reason, but I
disremember what.
They tortured him and did some things too
evil to
repeat.
There was screaming sounds inside the barn,
there was
laughing sounds out on the street.
Then they rolled his body down a gulf amidst
a blood-red rain
And they threw him in the waters wide to
cease his
screaming pain.
The reason that they killed him there, and
I'm sure it
ain’t no lie,
He was a Black skin boy so he was born to
die
And then to stop the United States of
yelling for a trial,
Two brothers they confessed that they had
killed poor
Emmett Till.
But on the jury there were men who helped
the brothers
commit this awful crime,
And so this trial was a mockery, but nobody
seemed to mind.
I saw the morning papers but I could not
bear to see
The smiling brothers walkin' down the
courthouse stairs.
For the jury found them innocent and the
brothers they went free,
While Emmett's body still floats the foam of
a Jim Crow southern sea.
If you can't speak out against this kind of
thing, a crime
that's so unjust,
Your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt,
your mind is
filled with dust.
Your arms and legs they must be in shackles
and chains, and
your blood it must cease to flow,
For you let this human race fall down so
God-awful low!
This song is just a reminder to remind your
fellow man
That this kind of thing still lives today in
that
ghost-robed Ku Klux Klan.
But if all us folks that thinks alike, if we
gave all we
could give,
We could make this great land of ours a
greater place to live.
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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Emmett
Till’S Glass-Top Casket
By
Cornelius Eady
By the time
they cracked me open again, topside,
abandoned in a toolshed, I had become
another kind of nest. Not many people
connect possums with Chicago,
but this is where the city ends,
after all, and I float still, after the
footfalls fade and the roots bloom around
us. The fact was, everything that
worked for my young man
worked for my
new tenants. The fact was, he had been gone
for years. They lifted him from my embrace,
and I was empty, ready. That’s how the
possums found me, friend,
dry-docked, a
tattered mercy hull. Once I held a boy who
didn’t look like a boy. When they finally
remembered, they peeked through my clear
top. Then their wild surprise.
April 5, 2010
Source:
NewYorker |
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The
Emmett Till Blues
By Al Young
What they use to just do and just done it to
me,
they doing it directly to all yall now,
doing it
and doing it and doing it to the world.
Shoot and cut and smash my head in,
take me to the river, sink me down –
you call that religion? Yeah, yeah!
It hadn’t of been for my mother bring
my busted body back up to Chicago and let
Jet get pictures for the world to look at,
nobody would of known. I’m long time gone.
Nowadays wouldn’t be no way I’d get to say
this on television, no way yall would even
see
a picture of me. Do yall even know who this
is
talking to you? This is Emmett Till. I died
and died and died. Soon as yall figured
America was saved, here come Guantánamo
and Abu Ghraib. Here come greed and
here come grief. The Thief of Baghdad
make they own commandments. Geronimo,
wouldn’t of paid them no mind. What you
think
they might pull next?
Talk to me. I been done died. |
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Bill Moyers Interviews Douglass A. Blackmon
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/06202008/watch2.html
Douglas A. Blackmon,
Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black
Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008)
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Emmett Till and Dr Kings Memorial.—by
Eddie Glaude, Jr..—Emmett
Till was murdered on August 28, 1955. They found his
body horribly mangled at the bottom of the Tallahatchie
River with a cotton gin fan tied around his neck with
barbed wire. Till had dared to break one of the sacred
rules of the Jim Crow South. He "flirted" with a white
woman. He was only fourteen years old.
Emmett Till's
mother, Mamie Till Mobley, decided to have an
open-casket funeral. She wanted everyone to see what
they had done to "her baby." The Chicago Defender
reported that over "250,000 people viewed and passed by
the bier of little Emmett Till . . . All were shocked,
some horrified and appalled. Many prayed, scores fainted
and practically all, men, women and children wept."
On September 15th,
1955 Jet Magazine published, unedited, the images of
Emmett Till. Black America was stunned. For some, this
was the first visual image of the brutality of American
racism. For others, the dead body of Till only confirmed
the disease at the heart of the United States. America
was sick. And Emmett Till was to become the sacrificial
lamb, which sparked the modern Civil Rights Movement
that sought to heal the nation.
What did Mamie Till
Mobley want us to see when she decided to leave open her
baby's coffin? What was she memorializing at that
moment? Obviously, her decision called attention to the
brutality of American racism. But I am convinced that
she wanted to make visible all of those victims of
American hatred who remained invisible. The nameless
black bodies that lined the bottom of the Tallahatchie
River and the spirits that were defeated daily by the
systemic and dehumanizing experience of white supremacy
were all captured in the brutally disfigured face of a
murdered fourteen-year old boy. Perhaps she wanted that
image to haunt the nation -- to force us to remember
those who reside in the shadows. Those images defined a
generation. And they, at least for me, continue to
haunt.
On the exact same
day, eight years later, an estimated 250,000 people
engaged in an historic demonstration before the Lincoln
Memorial for civil rights and economic justice. And it
was here that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his
famous "I Have a Dream" speech. In some ways, that
speech stands as a third "founding" of the nation. Just
as President Lincoln's second inaugural offered a
revision of the revolutionary beginnings of America, Dr.
King's words expanded the very idea of American
democracy in which the promises of freedom and justice
would be extended to its entire people..—HuffingtonPost
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1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” |
We learn how the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar cane have
disrupted and convulsed the planet and will continue
to do so until we are finally living on one
integrated or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of all this
remarkable change will survive the process they
helped to initiate more than five hundred years ago
remains, Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question.
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Ratification
The People Debate the Constitution,
1787-1788
By Pauline Maier
A
notable historian of the early republic,
Maier devoted a decade to studying the
immense documentation of the
ratification of the Constitution.
Scholars might approach her book’s
footnotes first, but history fans who
delve into her narrative will meet
delegates to the state conventions whom
most history books, absorbed with the
Founders, have relegated to obscurity.
Yet, prominent in their local counties
and towns, they influenced a
convention’s decision to accept or
reject the Constitution. Their
biographies and democratic credentials
emerge in Maier’s accounts of their
elections to a convention, the political
attitudes they carried to the conclave,
and their declamations from the floor.
The latter expressed opponents’
objections to provisions of the
Constitution, some of which seem
anachronistic (election regulation
raised hackles) and some of which are
thoroughly contemporary (the power to
tax individuals directly). |
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Ripostes from proponents, the Federalists, animate
the great detail Maier provides, as does her recounting
how one state convention’s verdict affected another’s.
Displaying the grudging grassroots blessing the
Constitution originally received, Maier eruditely yet
accessibly revives a neglected but critical passage in
American history.—Booklist
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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. |
The artist also gives detailed reasoning behind
his choices. This underpinning information makes this a full
experience, eminently teachable from several aspects, including
historical and literary—School
Library Journal /
Winner of 2012 Frost Medal /
The Shocking Story /
Carver:
A Life
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Incognegro: A Memoir of
Exile and Apartheid
By Frank
B. Wilderson III
Wilderson, a professor,
writer and filmmaker from
the Midwest,
presents a gripping account
of his role in the downfall
of South African apartheid
as one of only two black
Americans in the African
National Congress (ANC).
After marrying a South
African law student,
Wilderson reluctantly
returns with her to South
Africa in the early 1990s,
where he teaches
Johannesburg and Soweto
students, and soon joins the
military wing of the ANC.
Wilderson's stinging
portrait of Nelson Mandela
as a petulant elder eager to
accommodate his white
countrymen will jolt readers
who've accepted the
reverential treatment
usually accorded him. After
the assassination of
Mandela's rival, South
African Communist Party
leader Chris Hani, Mandela's
regime deems Wilderson's
public questions a threat to
national security; soon,
having lost his stomach for
the cause, he returns to
America. |
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Wilderson has a
distinct, powerful voice and
a strong story that shuffles
between the indignities of
Johannesburg life and his
early years in Minneapolis,
the precocious child of
academics who barely
tolerate his emerging
political consciousness.
Wilderson's observations
about love within and across
the color line and cultural
divides are as provocative
as his politics; despite
some distracting
digressions, this is a
riveting memoir of
apartheid's last days.— Publishers
Weekly
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The Prophet of Zongo Street
Stories by Mohammed Naseehu Ali
Vivid
images of African life and familiar snippets of expatriate
life infuse this debut collection by a Ghana-born writer and
musician. On the fictional Zongo Street in Accra, young
children gather around their grandmother to hear a creation
story from "the time of our ancestors' ancestors' ancestors"
in "The Story of Day and Night." In "Mallam Sille," a weak,
46-year-old virgin tea seller finds soulful strength in
marriage to a dominant village woman. Other stories take
place in and around New York City, depicting immigrants
struggling with American culture and values. A Ghanaian
caregiver vows not to "grow old in this country" in
"Live-In," while in "The True Aryan," an African musician
and an Armenian cabbie competitively compare tragic cultural
histories on the ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn, achieving
humanist understanding as they reach Park Slope: |
"I looked into his eyes, and with a sudden deep
respect said to the man, 'I'll take your pain, too.'
" Several stories close in a similarly magical,
almost folkloric epiphany, as when sleep becomes an
attempt "to bring calm to the pulsing heart of Man"
in "The Manhood Test." Ali speaks melodiously but
not always provocatively in these tales of
transition and emigration.—Publishers
Weekly
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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____ 2005
Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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ChickenBones Store
(Books, DVDs, Music, and more)
update
6 February 2012
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