The "The Sad Tale Of Emmett Till" Story

The National Museum of African History & Culture

It was an ordinary day.  Looking at a rather gruesome photograph of a fourteen year old boy that is on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of African History & Culture (NMAAH&C) in Washington, DC.  The boy, Emmett Till, an African American, had been beaten and shot to death for allegedly whistling at a white woman in a small grocery store in a Mississippi town.  It was 64 years ago that Emmett and his cousin Curtis walked into Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market where 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant was working by herself.  It was reported that Emmett accosted her both verbally and physically.  When Carolyn's husband Roy returned from a fishing trip Carolyn told him her version of the encounter.  

14 year old Emmett Till and mother Mamie.

Wasn't long before Roy and his half-brother J.W. set out on a mission of revenge and racial terrorism that ended with the brutalizing and murder of Emmett.  The two men were acquitted on all charges by an all-white jury in a trial in September of 1955.  In recent decades Carolyn recanted much of her testimony, such as the physical part of her confrontation with Emmett.  But, the fact that he was brutalized and lynched hasn't changed.  The story of Emmett is told at the NMAAH&C while showing the actual casket in which Emmett was buried after his early September funeral in Chicago.  At the time of his death Emmett lived with his single mother Mamie in Chicago.  Mamie's parents had left Mississippi as part of the Great Migration when she was just two years old, but in the summer of 1955 Emmett went to Mississippi to visit with Mamie's uncle and his family.  

The open casket at the funeral for Emmett.

The memorial at NMAAH&C tells a great deal about Mississippi, the South and America in 1955.  The Department of Justice exhumed Emmitt's remains as part of a 2005 investigation into his murder, and he was re-buried in a new casket while the old casket was stored at the cemetery and discovered once again in 2009.  At the time NMAAH&C, still in development at the time, acquired the casket to allow the museum to tell the true story.  Emmett's mother told that she wants people to feel like she did and feel the complexity of emotions that surrounded his death.  The story of Emmett's mother is also told at the Museum.  She married at 18 to Louis Till who was consistently abusive which led to his choking Mamie to unconsciousness in 1942, a year after Emmett was born.  He was arrested and then chose to join the Army rather than face prison.  

The sad part of this story is what you see above.  This sign
was placed at the site where he was killed in Mississippi.
A few have decided to use it for target practice.  T

Three years later he was court-martialed and executed in Italy for murder and rape.  When Emmett was murdered Mamie chose to have an open-casket service to show the world what the two men had done to her child.  Mamie embarked on an NAACP-organized speaking tour to tell the story of her son and her tour has been an inspiration to all that hear her story.  Her audiences can feel her pain and understand her loss.  To this day this senseless crime is still shocking.  Has the state of Mississippi changed?  Hopefully someway, somehow, continued understanding of America's racial problems and tensions will improve.  At times it feels as if we as a nation haven't figured out a solution.  Seems that those that began to make progress have been replaced with another generation that doesn't have the slightest clue of how to keep racial peace.  Perhaps it is just a blip in the road to a truly peaceful reconciliation between all races and nationalities.  And, hopefully the NMAAH&C can be the glue to hold our nation together as we strive for equality for all.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.