In 2010, I started researching a book on the Emmett Till murder. I often had to explain to people that Till was a 14-year-old African American youth from Chicago who, while visiting kin in the Mississippi Delta in 1955, was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman. To be more precise, white Americans needed reminding about Till, not Black ones.
My book came out at the end of 2018, around the same time as a few other books on Till. And that turned out to be part of a larger flood of remembrance.
Early in the 21st century came television documentaries, then newspaper articles on the 50th anniversary of the murder. The pace has only quickened: A whole room in Washington’s Museum of African American History and Culture dedicated to the Till story; Congressional anti-lynching legislation named for Till; and last November, a much praised feature-length film. Plus, there was the steady drumbeat of journalists invoking the Till story with each horrible new killing: Tamir Rice, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and on and on.
Historical memory is an odd thing. A century ago, Confederate statues rose alongside rigid new Jim Crow segregation laws. They were marble emblems of white supremacy back then, and they still are for too many white people today. For most of us, however, they were like wallpaper — we barely noticed them. We had to be reminded that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were defenders of slavery, icons of racism, insurrectionists against America. Their valor was put to evil use. There was nothing innocent about those statues.
What prompts me to write is a new book about the Emmett Till story, A Few Days Full of Trouble by Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr. and professor Christopher Benson of Northwestern University. Parker was with his cousin Emmett in Mississippi when the kidnappers came in the night. Benson teaches journalism at Northwestern and 20 years ago, he collaborated with Mamie Till on her excellent memoir, The Death of Innocence.
Is there anything new to say about the Till saga? Quite a bit, it turns out. Parker has lived with this story for almost 70 years now, with the trauma of witnessing armed men break into the home where he slept, take away his cousin and best friend, murder him, then be acquitted by a jury. It is one thing to know the story. It is another to see it through Rev. Parker’s eyes, and to feel his ongoing struggle for justice.
Parker and Benson retell the story — the murder; the slander that Till was a would-be rapist; the trial of his killers in Sumner, Mississippi; their acquittal; their confession-for-pay on the pages of Look magazine. Equally important, the authors reveal the struggles of the Till family to get at the truth after all of these years — the factual truth and the moral truth.
The process has been a torturous one, involving local prosecutors, the FBI, and, not always so innocently, historians.
Even today, that struggle continues. Carolyn Bryant, now an elderly woman, testified in court in 1955 that 14-year-old Emmett attacked her. We know from documentary evidence that she lied in accordance with the age-old slur against Black men with white women, lies that got Till killed and his murderers exonerated.
But justice, as Parker makes us understand, means more than just uncovering facts, or replacing lies with truth. Justice means that those who violated the law or committed crimes against humanity must own what they did, acknowledge it, accept blame.
Then the healing can start for everyone — perpetrators, victims, all of us.
Elliott Gorn teaches history at Loyola University Chicago.
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