Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508280077
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: SUMNER, MISS. LENGTH: Long
Mamie Till Bradley had taken to her bed. She wasn't sure she would ever be able to get up from it again, not to face the world of pain and hate, a world from which her only child had been so brutally taken.
``It was the Wednesday morning that we learned the body had surfaced. Up until then, there was that hope that he would turn up alive ...
``I wasn't interested in doing anything but going into a shell. I went to bed. I was sort of in a twilight zone.
``Then, I recognized a presence. It was like a big cloud in the room. Something not visible, but you could feel it. I was raised to a sitting position. I began to ask questions right away, not in words, but I could understand: Why my son? Why did he have to be taken away from me?
``I was told that Emmett was sent here for a special job. I had been privileged to be the one to take care of him on Earth.
``Now, there was another job for me to do.''
As she vividly described that spiritual experience, 40 years later, she laughed softly, recalling another message from that evening: ``Emmett Till will never be forgotten.''
\ In the early morning hours of Aug. 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett ``Bobo'' Till, visiting from Chicago, was rousted from his bed in his uncle's Mississippi shack by two white men in search of vengeance. His crime - flirting with a white woman.
Three days later, his body - eye detached, ear missing, head bashed in - was noticed by a fisherman on the Tallahatchee River. With his death, a powerful, lasting symbol was born.
``His bloated face was the ugliness of American racism staring us right in the eye,'' says Clenora Hudson-Weems, a University of Missouri-Columbia professor and author of ``Emmett Till: Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement.'' ``It became the catalyst for the civil rights movement. It set the stage for the Montgomery bus boycott three months later.''
There were hundreds of lynchings in this country from post-Reconstruction to the climactic 1960s civil rights achievements.
Indeed, two black men who had advocated voting rights for their race had been murdered earlier in 1955 in Mississippi. But the bullet fired into a brash, handsome boy's head would be a shot heard round the world.
His mother demanded that he be brought home for burial and she insisted upon an open casket for the grisly corpse and a public viewing that drew tens of thousands.
``Have you ever sent a loved son on vacation and had him returned to you in a pine box so horribly battered and waterlogged that someone needs to tell you this sickening sight is your son?'' she asked then.
The subsequent trial of two white men in this Mississippi Delta town was covered by journalists from all over, and their acquittals spurred worldwide outrage. It was ``the first great media event of the civil rights movement,'' wrote David Halberstam in his 1993 book, ``The Fifties.''
``For whatever reason - the brutality of the murder of a child, the public funeral in Chicago, or the vague sense among many in the North that something like this was bound to happen - the case became a cause celebre,'' Halberstam wrote.
\ Emmett's mother and grandmother didn't want him to go to their native Mississippi. He didn't understand. After all, his cousins from Mississippi had stayed with him, so why couldn't he stay at their home?
Finally, they gave in. Before a goodbye kiss and watching his train pull away, his mother drilled Emmett on Mississippi mores - say ``yes sir, no sir,'' don't look whites straight in the eye, don't talk to them unless spoken to.
``He had no idea. It was like another culture,'' recalls Wheeler Parker Jr., one of several cousins who accompanied Emmett on the train.
They arrived Aug. 20. Emmett, a stocky, round-faced boy who wore fine clothes, soon was the talk of the little town of Money, Miss. He claimed to have a white girlfriend and flashed her school picture around.
``He was full of fun, liked jokes and pranks,'' Parker says.
One day they had a flat tire in a white neighborhood, Parker says. He and the others carefully avoided looking around, for fear of ``eyeballing'' a white woman.
Emmett found such behavior comical. A couple of days later, he apparently decided to show off when, after a morning of farm chores and swimming, a group of eight or so went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money.
There are different versions of what happened next. While buying bubble gum and candy, Emmett said something to storekeeper Carolyn Bryant, a pretty white brunette a French newspaper would later breathlessly describe as ``a crossroads Marilyn Monroe.''
She claimed he grabbed her hand and assured her he had been with white women before.
As he left the store, he whistled loudly. Several witnesses said it was definitely a ``wolf whistle.''
Bryant stormed out of the store, Parker remembers, and people playing checkers on the porch warned she was getting a gun. The boys raced away.
Bryant's husband Roy had been trucking shrimp with his half-brother J.W. Milam. Some say they were told of the incident by a jealous Mississippi cousin of Emmett, others say word of the daring flirtation had spread quickly.
Whatever, Milam's pickup truck roared up to Mose Wright's house around 2 a.m. Aug. 28. They told Emmett's uncle they wanted ``the nigger who done the talking.''
Parker says they barged into his room first.
But Emmett stepped forward. ``Yeah,'' he said, to the anger of the white men who wanted to be called ``sir.''
They left with him. It was the last time any of his relatives saw Emmett alive.
by CNB