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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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 Emmett Till Story

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

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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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). 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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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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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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update 6 February 2012