28 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Till, Emmett(1941–55):
Chicago teenager mur-
dered in Mississippi for
allegedly flirting with a
white woman.
George Lee – died in his car, which was ruled an accident. After an exam-
ination of the body revealed shotgun pellets in Lee’s mouth, the sheriff the-
orized that ‘maybe they’re fillings from his teeth.’ Gus Courts, an NAACP
organizer, ignored death threats and steep rent increases on his grocery store
to keep his name on the voting roll, only to be felled by two shotgun blasts.
He survived somehow and fled the state. The third registrant was Lee’s
widow, and she steered clear of the polling booth. In Brookhaven, Lamar
Smith, a 63-year-old farmer who was teaching blacks how to vote by absen-
tee ballot, was shot dead in broad daylight on the courthouse lawn in front
of thirty witnesses. Such assaults went unreported by the national press
corps, which viewed racial violence in the South as routine. Although no one
was charged with these crimes, a new spirit was emerging, as local blacks
armed themselves to the teeth, attended the funerals in large numbers, and
boycotted merchants suspected of being citizen councilors.
It would take the brutal murder of a 14-year-old Chicagoan named
Emmett Tillto expose the evil of lynching and spur the nascent civil rights
movement. Before putting her cocky, chubby son on a bus to visit relatives
in Money, Mississippi, Emmett’s mother gave him a stern warning: ‘Be care-
ful. If you have to get down on your knees and bow when a white person
goes past, do it willingly.’ Emmett forgot all about the warning when local
boys double-dared him to proposition Carolyn Bryant, a 21-year-old beauty
queen and cashier in her husband’s grocery store. Accounts differ as to what
Emmett did. His cousin recalled that Emmett smart-mouthed Bryant by say-
ing ‘bye, baby’ upon leaving, but Bryant insisted that Till grabbed her wrist,
spoke lewdly, and wolf-whistled at her.
Enraged at such impertinence, Carolyn’s husband Roy and his half-
brother John Milam seized the youngster in the middle of the night, forced
him to strip naked, and gave him one last chance to grovel to a white man:
‘You still as good as I am?’ Milam asked. When Emmett said he was, Milam
blew his brains out with a .45 caliber Colt revolver and dumped his body in
the Tallahatchie river with a heavy fan barb-wired around his neck. After
Milam pocketed $4,000 in blood money from a reporter, he divulged his
murderous motive: ‘When a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with
a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin.’...“Chicago boy,” I said. “I’m tired of
’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you, I’m going
to make an example of you – just so everybody can know how me and my
folks stand.” ’
Emmett’s mother shipped his battered corpse to Chicago and kept the
casket opened during the funeral so that the entire world could see ‘what
they did to my boy.’ Emmett’s grisly face repulsed thousands of blacks who
filed by the body and many more who saw a Jetmagazine photograph.
NAACP chief Roy Wilkinssummed up the senseless murder for an angryWilkins, Roy(1901–81):
Lobbied for civil rights as
head of the NAACP.