Friday, August 28th, 2020 marked the 65th Anniversary of the death of Emmett Till. He was a 14-year-old Black boy from Chicago who was visiting his family in Money, Mississippi in 1955. Young Emmett wasn’t aware of just how racist it was in the south when he went, so when he walked into a store to get some candy he playfully whistled at a young white cashier named Carolyn Bryant.

His cousins were terrified, jumped in the vehicle, and they all quickly left the scene. They already knew the danger that the boy was now possibly in. Emmett didn’t realize it until her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half-brother, J.W. Milan, showed up at his uncle’s house late at night with flashlights and pistols in hand looking for the boy.

They abducted Emmett, took him to an old shed deep in the country, and tortured him brutally for hours on end. A few days later, a local boy was fishing in the Tallahatchie River and found the teenager’s terribly mutilated body.

The late Ed Bradley from 60 Minutes, (who was about the same age as Emmett in 1955 but lived in Philadelphia when the gruesome murder took place), described it like this in his 2004 report:

“His body was weighed down by a cotton gin fan attached to his neck by barbed wire. He’d been badly tortured, an eye was detached, an ear cut off, and he appeared to have been shot in the head…”

Local authorities in Mississippi wanted to shadow the event from the outside world by quickly trying to bury his body there. But, Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till, wrestled with them until she got her son’s body sent back home to Illinois. When she saw how it looked, it tore her soul apart. Still, as deeply and painfully hurt and mortified as she was, she wanted America to see exactly what had happened to her son, so that it would expose what was going on in the deep South.

Mamie had Emmett’s funeral at the Robert’s Temple Church of God In Christ in Chicago with an open casket, and the pictures of her dead son shocked the entire country. His death further sparked the Civil Rights Movement, and to this very day those photos continue to be a horrific symbol of what took place during that awful time in American history.

The People Who Were Involved in Emmett Till’s Murder

It all started when Emmett Till whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who was in her early 20’s in 1955. She told her husband Roy, who was the owner of the store that Emmett and his cousins walked into to buy candy that day, that Emmett had touched her and said sexual things to her. But, years later, America found out that was a lie.

Timothy Tyson, author of The Blood of Emmett Till, is the only person who ever spoke to Carolyn Bryant on record about the African-American boy’s gruesome death. Timothy was once on an episode of Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien talking about his interview with Carolyn. “She brought me inside her house,” he began, “and she was like every Methodist church lady that I ever knew growing up. She was 74-years-old maybe, something like that, a little frail.”

The host asked Tyson about the part in his book where he’d written that Carolyn had said that she’d lied about Emmett grabbing her around the waist and uttering obscenities at her back in 1955 at that store in Money, Mississippi.

“Did she say, ‘I lied’?” Soledad O’Brien asked the Duke University Historian.

“She didn’t use that word,” he responded. “She sort of painted that piece of her testimony, and said ‘That part’s not true’. So, I asked her what was true, and she said ‘I would like to tell you, honestly, but I can’t remember. She said ‘You tell these stories until they seem true, but that part’s not true.’ And then she said, ‘Nothing that boy did could ever justify what happened to him.’”

Emmett Till’s torturers and murderers, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milan, are both dead. Bryant died in 1994 and Milan back in 1981, but they are widely known as the killers who truly got away with pure murder. They didn’t even take the trial that they had in Mississippi for Emmett’s murder seriously, and an all-white jury found them not guilty in under an hour for Emmett Till’s death.

A few months later, the Black boy’s killers, knowing that they were protected by double jeopardy, took a $4,000 payment from Look Magazine and confessed publicly that they had indeed killed Emmett. The article was entitled “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi”, and neither of the men had any charges brought up against them for Emmett Till’s death, ever.

The Relevance of Emmett Till’s Murder Today

With the recent police shootings of Black people in America, the fact that so many of today’s officers have not been punished for murder mirrors the fact that the same type of thinking is still going on in this country as it did when the killers who murdered Emmett Till got off free.

His death will never be forgotten and organizations such as the Emmett Till Legacy Foundation (supported by actor Taye Diggs) will ensure that his death will be always remembered as a pivotal and majorly significant part of American history forever.

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U.S. Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis died on July 17th, 2020 from pancreatic cancer. After representing Georgia’s 5th District in the U.S. House of Representatives for over 30 years, one of our strongest soldiers against racial injustice passed away at the age of 80.

I think young people today should look at everything he did in his early 20’s and realize that no matter how young you are, you can make a huge difference in society. I personally appreciate him the most for putting himself in harm’s way just so I can vote.

That being said, please honor his memory by hitting the polls this year in 2020. He shed a lot of blood in his life for us to be able do so.

The Early Life of Congressman John Lewis

I think that former United States President Barack Obama said it best when describing Congressman Lewis’ early life while giving his eulogy at the funeral that was held in Atlanta on July 30th. “John was born into modest means,” he said. “That means he was po’.”

Not poor, but po’. As a person who has lived a low-income life, I know that po’ is a lot worse.

The city he was born near, Troy, Alabama, had been burned to the ground just a few decades before he came into the world. His parents were humble, poverty-stricken sharecroppers, and had a hard life to put it lightly. Sources that mention the burning down of Troy in 1901 don’t clearly say why the city was destroyed, or whether it was purposefully done. But, it’s no secret that similar events in the early 1900’s, such as the Burning of Black Wall Street a.k.a The Tulsa Oklahoma Race Massacre, were racially motivated.

Growing up seeing how African-Americans were so discriminated against in the Jim Crow South, John decided from a very young age that he would make it his life’s purpose to denounce racial segregation and promote equal human rights in America. In fact, he was only 21-years-old when he was arrested for being one of the original Freedom Riders.

This was a group that was started in the late 1940’s by the Congress of Racial Equality, also known as C.O.R.E. According to the New York Times, they started a movement called the Journey of Reconciliation, one where they put themselves in danger of constant verbal and physical harm from racist Whites of the time by riding buses around the southern part of the United States as a nonviolent way of protesting against segregation in the public transportation system.

Most people see Congressman Lewis as a disciple of the late Civil Rights Leader Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., because he took the route of nonviolence while standing up for racial equality. When he was just in his mid-20’s, John became the Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). This shy, but bold Fisk University college kid, would regularly sacrifice his own life and limb during his peaceful demonstrations against Jim Crow laws.

John got locked up over forty times, and beat up by racist white mobs on a regular basis, just so we as Black people can live a better life today. Things that we take for granted today (like freely jumping on a Greyhound bus and going wherever we want to, or sitting at a Waffle House enjoying a meal), he had to take severe bodily harm and repeated incidents of incarceration for us to be able to enjoy.

Like many of us, Dr. King was such a huge influence on his life. Congressman Lewis was actually the last living speaker from the March on Washington, which was the event where Martin’s “I Have a Dream” speech was given. A little known fact is that John almost didn’t even get to make his speech that day because of the language he wanted to use in it.

According to The Washington Post, when the Archbishop of Washington, Patrick O’Boyle, found out beforehand that Lewis’ speech referred to the term “patience” as a “dirty and nasty word”, he made the young man take the line out before allowing him to take the podium. Apparently, that type of language was offensive to the Catholic Church, so they made him tone it down a little bit.

With everything that he’s done in an attempt to achieve equal rights in this country for it’s now 13.4% of African-Americans, I still think the most important thing John Lewis did for his and this current generation is stand up for our right to vote. Bloody Sunday, the horrible event that eventually helped to push the Voting Rights Act into existence, was to me the most potent example of his bravery during that dismal time in history.

Congressman John Lewis’ Bravery on Bloody Sunday

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been trying for several months to get Black folks registered to vote in Selma’s County seat. Then, early in 1965, Dr. King came to that area in Alabama to back them up for their cause. With him being such a well-known figure in America in the fight for equal rights, there were of course a lot more peaceful demonstrations spontaneously initiated in and around the Selma area at that point and time, simply because of his dynamic influence.

You can just imagine how the tensions between racist people and those who were doing the demonstrations had to be brewing from the time he got there at the beginning of January until mid-February, when the event that triggered the March from Selma to Montgomery occured. In Marion, Alabama, about a month after Dr. King had arrived in the area, some state troopers became increasingly aggressive in beating protesters with clubs, and one of them ended up shooting a young demonstrator named Jimmie Lee Jackson.

A cop shot the 26-year-old African-American man when he was just trying to stop the police from beating up his mama. After that, civil rights leaders had had enough, and they decided that they were gonna march 54 miles from Selma to Montgomery, straight to Governor Wallace’s doorstep to state their issues. They got the permission of President Lyndon Johnson, and the Commander in Chief ordered the National Guard to protect them on their five-day journey.

When Lewis, King, and the other over 600 marchers reached the bridge that is named after the Confederate general and leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Edmund Pettus, I can imagine the eerie feeling that must have been thick in the air. When Lewis and the protesters got to the top of the bridge, they could see a huge wall of state troopers, brandishing their billy clubs.

Lewis and those at the front of the marchers stood their ground dozens of feet away from them at the foot of the bridge, and tried to talk to and reason with the angry racists. They refused, and proceeded to beat the protesters with everything from whips to barbed wire wrapped sticks.

The late Congressman John Lewis suffered a fractured skull during Bloody Sunday. The bridge is to this day still named after the Klan leader, but there are now talks of renaming it in John’s honor.

Not only as Black man, but as a man, I just want to say Thank you, John Lewis, for everything you did for me and my generation. May your fighting soul now rest peacefully.

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