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Emmett Till: A reminder of how a human should be treated
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Emmett Till is in the news again as the place his mother chose to put his remains is the center of a grave site re-sell scheme as well as a bogus charity: the Emmet Till Memorial Fund for a supposed museum.
Till died in 1955 at age 14 in August. What he did exactly to be murdered is disputed, but what his death made clear to the nation was that savage street justice was being applied in Mississippi. Did he wolf whistle? Did he put his arm around the waist of a white woman? Either way, it doesn't justify his torture and murder. Luckily, when the murder case was officially reopened, the investigators did find a body that they could positively identify as Emmet Louis Till in May 2004. He died from a gunshot wound to the head. He had fractures in his skull, legs and arms. His eye had been gouged out. Then he was tied with barbed wired to a 70-lb. cotton gin fan and thrown into the Tallahatchie River where it remained for three days.
His mother Mamie Till Bradley insisted on an open casket for his Chicago funeral and the photos showed what happened to black men who were used as examples.
I met his mother, Mamie Carthan Till Bradley when she was in Los Angeles. By that time she was Mamie Till Mobley and in poor health. She had written a play, having refused to let anyone else tell her son's story. The play was awful. How do you tell a mother that? I looked up accounts of the trial. News made the front page of the New York Times. I wrote an honest review and I hope I did not break a mother's heart again. Mamie Mobley died in 2003 at 81, before her son was exhumed and a conclusive autopsy was done. One of the reasons for the acquittal was there was supposedly not enough evidence to prove the body was Emmett Till's. Of course, after the acquittal two men accepted money and told their story, smugly safe because of double jeopardy laws.
Rev. Jesse Jackson was at the news conference when her death was announced ready with a quote.
'What must be put into perspective is that we often say the modern Civil Rights movement began with Rosa Parks in Montgomery. That's really not accurate,'' Mr. Jackson said. He said Emmett's murder ''broke the emotional chains of Jim Crow.''
''Mrs. Mobley did a profound strategic thing,'' Mr. Jackson added. ''With his body water-soaked and defaced, most people would have kept the casket covered. She let the body be exposed. More than 100,000 people saw his body lying in that casket here in Chicago. That must have been at that time the largest single civil rights demonstration in American history.''
Rev. Jesse Jackson was ready with a quote about the current crisis at the graveyard as well:
"In my judgment, there should be no bail for them, there should be really a special place in hell for these graveyard thieves who have done so much, hurt these families," he said.
Some day I hope someone will write a great play about Emmett Till because he certainly deserves to be remembered. On the one hand we have Michael Jackson and on the other Emmett Till. We have a grave site unknown and a grave site known. A boy that never wanted to grow up and another that never did. A man who married two white women and a boy who courted disaster by flirting with one white woman. There are worries that the grave of the famous will be disturbed and yet we already know that many graves, perhaps 300, have been disturbed due to greed. To conjure up the images of these two--Michael Jackson and Emmett Till, side by side is sort of a multimedia haiku filled with irony and sadness.
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