The murder of Emmett Till and how we remember it
In the following excerpt from Let the People See: The Story of Emmett Till, author Elliott J. Gorn illustrates the fallibility of memory surrounding Emmett Till’s murder and how that impacted the civil rights movement.
We all know the story: In late August 1955, a fourteen-year-old Chicago kid named Emmett Till went to visit family in Mississippi. At a crossroads store in the tiny Delta town of Money, Till whistled at the white woman behind the counter. A few days later, he was kidnapped, beaten, and shot. His abductors weighted his body down and threw it in the Tallahatchie River.
A friend of mine from Chicago was also fourteen when they murdered Emmett Till. He told me recently about the photo he saw back then in the newspaper, a photo of Till’s body after it had been pulled from the river, his face crushed, a cotton-gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire as a weight.
No such photo exists. No journalists were by the riverbank to take pictures, and the police photographer who waited back at the sheriff’s office in Greenwood took the official photos long after they cleaned the muck off Till’s body and removed the weights tied around his neck.
Maybe my friend was thinking of the funeral pictures, taken a few days later in Chicago, and which have now become horrifically iconic. When Mamie Till Bradley saw how savagely her son had been beaten she asked the mortician not to prettify him, and more, she insisted on a glass top over his coffin. “Let the people see what they did to my boy,” she famously said.
But I am sure my friend did not see those photos either. He is white. He was not a reader of Jet magazine or the Chicago Defender, two publications that carried them. African Americans across the country saw the pictures. They passed them around, discussed them, and took grim determination from them. While mainstream newspapers and magazines devoted lots of coverage to the Till story, none published the photos of Emmett’s battered face. Few white Americans saw those now-infamous images until video documentaries of the Civil Rights Movement made by African Americans began to appear late in the 1980s.
Our memories are not always reliable. Emmett Till’s story has been repeated so often in recent years, the photographs so widely reproduced, that it feels as if we have always known about them. Even as I write these words, a new cover story in Time magazine, “The Most Influential Images of All Time,” featuring the one hundred photos that “changed the world,” includes two of Emmett Till. These photographs “proved a black life matters,” Time’s editors declared; the pictures “forced the world to reckon with the brutality of American racism.”
Seeing had moral consequences in Time’s telling of the story; Americans were converted by the visceral impact of those horrifying images. But if “seeing” did not happen until decades later, then surely it could not explain that moral reckoning. Similarly, in 1995, forty years after covering the trial of Till’s killers in Sumner, Mississippi, the journalist David Halberstam called it “The first great media event of the Civil Rights Movement.” Yet only after all that time had passed could Halberstam understand fully the significance of what he witnessed back in 1955, only then could he put the name Emmett Till together with “media event” and “Civil Rights Movement.”
The Till saga is like that. Our popular version of the story, worn smooth as an ancient ballad, tells the essential truths: that an innocent boy was murdered because he violated a social code he did not understand, that his mother invited the world to look at his destroyed face, and that her courage helped propel the Civil Rights Movement. All of this is true. The implied part, however, is not. That the crucifixion in Emmett Till’s face softened white peoples’ hearts and put America on the road to racial justice — that, as a television report on CNN put it in 2003, “everything changed after the murder of Emmett Till” — is a pleasant untruth. Few white people saw the photographs. Radical change demanded years more struggle and far more blood.
Depending on who told it, where, when, and why, Emmett Till’s story was filled with ambiguity, distortions, even outright lies.
Elliott J. Gorn is Joseph A. Gagliano Chair in American Urban History at Loyola University Chicago. He is author of several books, including Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year that Made America’s Public Enemy Number One.
