Name: The Blood of Emmett Till
Author: Timothy B. Tyson

What’s in it for me? Learn how one boy’s death inspired a movement.

You are probably familiar with Rosa Parks, who in 1955 refused to obey a bus driver’s command to give up her seat for a white man. Her act became a symbol for the struggle against white oppression in the US and helped ignite the Civil Rights Movement.

Less known, but no less important, is an event that occured a few months earlier; the gruesome murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American boy from Chicago. In fact, when Rosa Parks was committing her act of defiance on the bus, she had the tragic fate of Emmett Till in mind.

Through the lens of Till’s murder, and the subsequent trial, these blinks tell the story of a country plagued by centuries of racism and white oppression.

In this pack, you’ll learn

how modern media made the civil rights movement possible;
how white supremacists terrorized whites as well as blacks; and
that the “end of segregation” did not really mean the end of segregation.

Racists in a segregated America were not afraid to kill for their ideology.

Throughout the twentieth century, the United States struggled to confront its history of slavery and to counteract prevalent racial prejudices. In the southern States, segregation, both legal and illegal, was ubiquitous.

Consequently, between 1910 and 1970, millions of African-Americans fled and migrated to the North from the American South. They settled in cities like Chicago, hoping for a better life.

But in these northern cities, too, separation of communities along race lines was common.

Such racial ghettoization was clearly indicative of the discrimination blacks faced. Violence against them was not uncommon.

Between 1910 and 1930, the number of African-Americans in Chicago doubled. Competition for housing and work was tough, especially with European immigrants.

Blacks were forced to live in ghettoized parts of Chicago’s South Side. Eventually, housing shortages forced black residents to move out into adjoining neighborhoods, which had previously been entirely white.

In 1949, a mob of whites, about 2000-strong, attacked a building belonging to a black couple in a white neighborhood on the South Side.

If you were black, any supposed transgression in this atmosphere could cost you your life.

This is how Emmett Till met his end, at the age of 14. In 1955, Till caught a train from Chicago to Mississippi to visit his great uncle and cousins. Till was unused to the extreme racism of the South, and made the mistake of flirting with Carolyn Bryant, a white woman, while she was working at her husband’s store.

She later told her attorney that Till had squeezed her hand, asked her out and boasted to her about sleeping with white women in the past.

Within days of the incident, Carolyn’s husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother-in-law, J. W. Milam, arrived at the house of Reverend Mose Wright, Till’s great uncle. They were brandishing guns. They were there for Till.

After lynching Emmett Till, they threw his body into the Tallahatchie River.

Carolyn Bryant, however, never expressed utter certainty that Till was the boy who’d talked her up at the store.

Racism and bigotry are learned from a young age, whether you’re the victim or the perpetrator.

For African-American kids growing up in the early twentieth century, racial segregation was just part of life, and the dangers of crossing the divide were all too real.

Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, who was raised in Argo, Illinois, grew up hearing a particularly chilling cautionary tale. In Mississippi, there was once a little black girl who befriended the daughter of the white woman for whom her mother worked.

Till’s family were hell bent on justice, even putting themselves at risk.

When Mamie Bradley received a call from a relative about her son’s abduction, she knew she couldn’t rely on the authorities in Mississippi. So she took matters into her own hands and contacted the Chicago press, especially the black newspapers.

The stakes were raised as soon as Till’s body was found in the Tallahatchie River. He’d been weighed down with cotton processing machinery and had barbed wire wrapped around his neck.

Key ideas in The Blood of Emmett Till

About the Author

Timothy B. Tyson is the author of Blood Done Sign my Name (2005), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the winner of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and the Southern Book Award for Nonfiction. As a professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, he teaches about religion, racial issues and civil rights in the South.