INTRODUCTION
I was born near Chicago, Illinois, in 1954, just one year before fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Though his death and the trial of his murderers received national press coverage and especially intense attention in his hometown of Chicago, my parents recall nothing at all of the case or the news coverage of the trial.
But parents can’t know everything, so school should have introduced me to this landmark civil rights event, but it didn’t. Through elementary school, junior high, high school, college, and graduate school I never once read nor heard anything about Emmett Till. It wasn’t until I was writing a book about the life and works of Newbery-winning author Mildred D. Taylor that I first encountered Emmett. In one of her essays, Taylor made a reference to a fourteen-year-old African American boy who had been murdered in her home state of Mississippi in 1955. I followed up on the reference to Emmett just to make sure it wasn’t something I should include in my book about Taylor.
What I found stunned me: a gruesome photograph of this boy from Chicago, lying in a casket, his face and head horribly disfigured. The article that accompanied the photo grabbed my interest, not because it had anything to do with Mildred D. Taylor, but because it detailed a critical moment in American civil rights history that I, with all of my years of schooling and reading, had never learned. This article piqued my interest, and I dug some more, eventually finding two very helpful books about the case, Clenora Hudson-Weems‘s Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement and Stephen J. Whitfield’s A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. Plater Robinson and his Soundprint radio documentary “The Murder of Emmett Till” also provided invaluable background information about the case.
So, who was Emmett Till and why hadn’t I learned about him?
My research in the last few years has shown that most white Americans have never heard of him, and a review of history textbooks suggests why. In a survey of twenty-one high school U.S. history books published since 1990, I found that every book included information about two famous civil rights events: the Supreme Court integration ruling, Brown v. Board of Education, and the Montgomery bus boycott started by Rosa Parks. Sadly, only two books mentioned Emmett Till, and those books used a combined total of less than fifty words to describe his place in American history. Neither book suggested that Emmett’s murder was the catalyst it was for the civil rights movement.
But most African Americans know well his story and its place in history.
In addition to the thousands of people who attended Emmett’s three-day viewing and the funeral that followed, hundreds of thousands more, including Mildred D. Taylor, read about his murder and the trial in the African American media of the time. The most sensational coverage of the murder, which included the photo of Emmett’s battered body resting in his casket, appeared in Jet magazine, and today, many middle-aged African Americans mark the moment by recollecting, “I remember when I saw the photo of Emmett Till in Jet magazine ...” similar to the way many white Americans mark the moment they heard that President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.
Emmett’s murder in August 1955 and the sham trial that followed it infuriated African Americans everywhere. For many, the brazen murder of a boy by two white men was the last straw in centuries of racial oppression and abuse. Even before Emmett’s death, African American activists had been working to formalize a civil rights movement, but the outrage that followed his death and the acquittal of his murderers finally launched the movement to combat racism in the United States.
To understand and appreciate the modern history of the fight for equal rights for African Americans, American teenagers of all races should know the story of Emmett Till and its impact on American society. This book will, I hope, keep alive the memory of the Emmett Till case and provide a broader understanding of the beginning of the civil rights movement.
In Memoriam
Emmett Louis Till, 1941-1955
“A little nobody who shook up the world. ”
—Mamie Till Bradley