Emmett Till and George Floyd
Do you know about Emmett Till? I didn’t. I hate to admit that I did not even learn his name until three years ago. Somehow my many years of education didn’t teach me about this black boy. Or maybe someone tried to teach me about him and I didn’t listen. Either way, it’s a shame.
He was born in 1941 in Chicago. A year before my dad was born. When he was fourteen years old, in the summer of 1955, his mother, Mamie Till, let him go to Mississippi to spend the summer with his great uncle, Moses Wright. Apparently Emmett wasn’t supposed to go but he really wanted to, so his mother gave in. Sounds like she was a little nervous — he was only fourteen. But it seemed like a good opportunity to get away from the city and enjoy the summer with his extended family.
Fourteen. FOURTEEN. And described as a “responsible, funny and infectiously high-spirited child.” He’d had polio as a child but made a full recovery except for a slight stutter that remained with him. His nickname was Bobo. I can picture this high-spirited fourteen year old black boy with a slight stutter. Can you?
So while he was in Mississippi he was accused of whistling at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant who was a cashier at her family’s grocery store. Did he whistle at her? Who knows. Who cares. He was a fourteen year old boy.
“Four days later, at approximately 2:30 a.m., Roy Bryant, Carolyn's husband, and his half brother J.W. Milam kidnapped Till from Moses Wright's home. They then beat the teenager brutally, dragged him to the bank of the Tallahatchie River, shot him in the head, tied him with barbed wire to a large metal fan and shoved his mutilated body into the water.”
Destroyed him. Tortured and brutally murdered that fourteen year old black boy. His body was found in the river three days later. Completely unrecognizable.
And I want to tell you the rest of the story because what his mother did is amazing. But for a minute let’s just sit in the horror.
Say his name.
Emmett Till.
“Bobo.”
Fourteen years old.
Mamie Till was back in Chicago when she received the worst news. The news all mothers fear, and black mothers fear in a way that I will never fully understand. And do you know what that courageous woman did? She had her baby’s body shipped back to Chicago and insisted on having a public viewing with an OPEN CASKET. As she explained, she wanted to "let the world see what has happened, because there is no way I could describe this. And I needed somebody to help me tell what it was like." His body was viewed by thousands of people over the course of five days and photos were published in national publications.
The murderers were acquitted by an all white, all male, jury. Acquitted. Many people believe that this was the event that galvanized the black community and started the civil rights movement. (Please take some time to read the whole powerful and important story.)
Fast forward to today. To George Floyd’s brutal murder. We saw it. We all saw it with our own eyes. No one has to try to describe to us what happened because we saw the whole brutal, horrifying, thing. And my prayer is that the death of George Floyd will be the event that galvanizes the white community. That our eyes will be opened to see the realities our friends of color have seen in full clarity for many, many years. And that in seeing, we will be changed.
