Telling the story of Emmett Till

Tonight the Bijou gave a free showing of The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till as part of the offerings to mark Human Rights Week here.

The film is a documentary about a black 14-year old boy from Chicago, Emmett Till, who went to Mississippi in the early nineteen-fifties to visit family. After walking out of a store, he whistled at a white woman whose husband tracked him down at his great-uncle's home that night. The husband and his friend took Emmett out into the night. A witness heard screams from a barn belonging to one of the men and saw one of them.

He was found three days later in a nearby river tied to a heavy machinery fan with barbed wire. After identification by his great-uncle, his body was put in a pine box and the sheriff ordered it buried. Back in Chicago, Emmett's mother pressured the Chicago authorities to stop the burial and have him brought back to Chicago. In one of the most memorable scenes, his mother tells how every part of his face had been mangled. The eyes: one missing, the other on his cheek. The bridge of his nose was broken and gashed. There were two teeth left. His tongue had been cut. They had used an axe and split the top of his head from side to side. Above his ear his head had been shot through. His mother insisted on an open casket, so that everyone could see. Film of the funeral shows people walking past the casket, then rushing outside where they faint with overwhelming disgust, anger, and sorrow onto rickety chairs set up outside the church.

The men who took Emmett Till that night were cleared of both murder and, not even making it past the grand jury stage, of kidnapping. The lawyer for the defendants claims indignantly after the grand jury ruling, not that his clients were innocent all along, but that it was a result of the meddling of the NAACP in the internal affairs of Mississippi. Shortly thereafter the defendants confessed to a journalist for $4000 knowing they couldn't be tried again for the same crime[1].

But his death, and his mother's refusal to cloak the depravity of racial hatred beneath a casket lid, motivated the civil rights movement of the fifties which has led to where we are now. That generation's accomplishments are even more remarkable when I consider how quickly they happened. Emmett Till was killed in the mid fifties. Twenty-five years later I was born and in the space of another twenty-five years the country has progressed so much that the scenes in this film from fifty years ago are almost unrecognizable. There is still a great deal of work to be done and in some ways it's more mundane, more difficult, less dramatic, less rewarding job but it's good to know and see that people change the world for the better even within lifetimes.

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[1] As a matter of law, I'm not sure why this would be so only for a grand jury ruling, but law may not have had much to do with it.