Emmett Till
Emmett Louis Till (* 25. July 1941 in Chicago , Illinois ; † 28. August 1955 in Money , Mississippi ) was an American of African-American descent, who at the age of 14 years at the time of racial segregation in the southern states of the United States to that of white grocer Roy Bryant and his half-brother JW Milam was murdered for racist motives .
Family background
Emmett Till, who stuttered slightly as a result of polio , was the only child of Louis Till (1922–1945) and his wife Mamie (Elizabeth), born in 1941. Carthan (1921–2003), born in Chicago. The mother raised the boy alone after separating from his father in 1942.
assassination
After visiting Chicago in July 1955 by his uncle Moses Wright, Emmett Till intended to make a return visit during his school vacation. Moses Wright was a preacher in Money, Mississippi, and owned a piece of land on which he and his family grew cotton. Till's mother rejected her son's idea because racial segregation was still widespread in the southern United States and she feared repression by whites. The return visit came off anyway.
Together with his cousins, Emmett Till went to the grocery store of Roy Bryant (1931-1994) and his wife Carolyn (* 1934) in Money on August 24, 1955 to buy sweets and lemonade. Carolyn Bryant, mother of two and former high school beauty queen, was alone in the sales room at the time. When leaving the shop, Emmett Till is said to have said “Bye, Babe” to the woman out of exuberance and whistled admiringly. According to the later portrayal of Carolyn Bryant, Till had embraced her around the waist and expressed himself immorally towards her. When Bryant went to their car to get a gun, the boys ran away in a panic. Emmett Till begged his cousins not to mention anything about the incident to his uncle.
In the early morning of August 28, 1955, Roy Bryant and his half-brother John William Milam (1919-1981) appeared at Moses Wright's and requested that Emmett Till be published. Wright explained to them that the boy knew nothing about the manners and customs of the south and he apologized on behalf of his nephew. His wife Elisabeth offered the men money to make amends . Bryant and Milam, however, knocked the couple down with the butt of their rifles , found Emmett Till in the house, loaded him onto their Chevrolet pickup, and drove away. As he was leaving the house, Moses Wright claims to have heard a woman's voice say, "Yes, he is".
After Emmett Till did not return by the following morning, Moses Wright eventually filed a complaint against Bryant and Milam for kidnapping. On August 31, 1955, Till's body was discovered by an angler at Pecan Point, a bank of the Tallahatchie River .
Investigations and Trial
The perpetrators tried to sink the body in the river using a 30 kg fan of a cotton machine that they had attached to the victim's neck with barbed wire . The dead man was missing an eye, had a broken nose, and had multiple wounds on his body and a bullet hole on the right side of his skull. During the autopsy, the coroner Chester Miller found on the basis of the water found in the lungs that Till was apparently still alive after the headshot. Moses Wright and his son Simeon identified the deceased as Emmett Till from a ring that was attached to the corpse's finger.
The sheriff from Money wanted to bury the dead on site. But Mamie Till got her son's body transferred to Chicago. At the funeral , around 50,000 people parade in front of the open coffin.
The publication of the case with the photo of the dead Emmett Till in Jet Magazine sparked horror and outrage at the national level about racism in the southern states and beyond. The scandalous trial of Bryant and Milam in Sumner, Mississippi was followed by numerous reporters. The twelve-member jury consisted exclusively of white men. Various prosecution witnesses mysteriously disappeared and those who testified were threatened. These included Moses Wright and the 18-year-old lead witness Willie Reed (1937–2013). A newspaper reporter described the following scenes in the courtroom: “People chatted and laughed in the auditorium, and picnics were held in the seats reserved for whites. During the whole process the defendants sat with their families and their children sat on their laps ”.
The defense put forward the conspiracy theory that the dead man was not Emmett Till, but that black activists, with the help of his uncle, took the boy's ring from the boy and put it on the body of a stranger. Till is alive and is probably somewhere in the north. The defense attorney JW Kellum went to the jury to the statement: "Your ancestors will turn in the grave if you do not release these men". After just five days of trial and 67 minutes of deliberation, the jury found both defendants not guilty. The acquittal sparked large protests among the black population of the southern states.
aftermath
Legally and politically
A few months after the verdict was announced, Roy Bryant and John William Milam admitted to Look Magazine for a fee of $ 4,000 that they had murdered Emmett Till. In the article in question, they described in detail how their act was carried out. According to current law, both perpetrators did not have to fear any legal consequences of their confession due to the acquittal (cf. Ne bis in idem ), but have since been socially ostracized. They eventually died impoverished and abandoned by their families.
The protests against the acquittal of the murderer Emmett Tills are considered to be the beginning of the black civil rights movement , along with the Montgomery bus boycott following the imprisonment of the civil rights activist Rosa Parks .
The case was reopened in 2005 in the documentary The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till by filmmaker Keith Beauchamp. For his documentation, Beauchamp had researched Money and the surrounding area for four and a half years, interviewed numerous eyewitnesses and found new clues about other perpetrators. According to Beauchamp's findings, there were at least eight other perpetrators besides Bryant and Milam. The FBI then heard contemporary witnesses, eyewitnesses, suspects and informants and arranged for the body of Emmett Till to be exhumed for a medical examination. Since then, the main suspect has been Carolyn Donham (divorced Bryant), who lives completely withdrawn as a result of the investigation.
In 2017, author Timothy Tyson released details of a 2007 interview with Carolyn Bryant in which she admitted that she made up the crucial part of her testimony. Regarding the statement that Till had grabbed her and verbally harassed her, Bryant said, "That part is not true". In the course of the interview, the then 72-year-old said that she could not remember any further details of what happened in the store.
Artistic
Bob Dylan wrote the folk song The Death of Emmett Till in 1962 . In 2011, the American singer Emmylou Harris released the song My Name Is Emmett Till on her album Hard Bargain, which deals with the fate of Till. In 2015, the American jazz singer and songwriter Melody Gardot wrote the title Preacherman for her album Currency of Man , which is also reminiscent of the lynching . In the collaboration of the American rappers Drake and The Throne (consisting of Jay-Z and Kanye West ) Kanye West sings: "We went way, way past the line of scrimmage [...] In the field like Emmett [...] I be blacking out, I ain't backing out. " (In German: "We have gone far beyond the limits of the crowd, are in the field like Emmett, I'm losing consciousness, but I'm not giving up"). The term line of scrimmage is a term used in American football.
The writer Lewis Nordan , who knew the killers personally, dealt with the murder in his 1993 novel Wolf Whistle .
| Open casket |
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| Dana protection |
| Oil on canvas |
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Link to the picture |
In 2017, artist Dana Schutz showed her painting Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial in New York , based on the photo of Till's battered face. Since protection is of European descent, it has been sharply criticized for cultural appropriation . The Afro-American conceptual artist Hannah Black accused her in an open letter of using “black suffering as raw material”: “It is not for protection to deal with the subject. The painting has to go. "
The Oscar-nominated short film My Nephew Emmett (2017) by Kevin Wilson, Jr. shows the events surrounding Till's death from the perspective of his uncle.
A spaceship in the Star Trek science fiction franchise was named after Emmett Till in 2018.
literature
- Timothy B. Tyson: The Blood of Emmett Till. Simon and Schuster, New York 2017, ISBN 9781476714844 .
- Devery S. Anderson: Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2015, ISBN 978-1-4968-0285-9 .
- Davis W. Houck, Matthew A. Grindy: Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press. University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2008, ISBN 978-1-934110-15-7 .
- Clenora Hudson-Weems: Emmett Till. The sacrificial lamb of the civil rights movement. Bloomington, Ind., AuthorHouse 2006.
- Christopher Metress (Ed.): The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville 2002, ISBN 0-8139-2122-8 .
Web links
- Emmett Louis Till in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved September 5, 2017.
- Mark Gado: Mississippi Madness: The Story of Emmet Till ( August 10, 2003 memento on the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ^ Louis Till in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved September 5, 2017.
- ↑ PBS: American Experience: Mamie Till Mobley (1921-2003)
- ↑ Washington Post January 8, 2003: Mamie Till-Mobley; Civil Rights Figure
- ↑ Mamie Carthan Mobley in the Find a Grave database . Retrieved September 5, 2017.
- ↑ A detailed report on the case appeared in Stern Biographie magazine , No. 3, 2005.
- ^ Sheila Weller: How Author Timothy Tyson Found the Woman at the Center of the Emmett Till Case . In: The Hive . ( vanityfair.com [accessed January 28, 2017]).
- ↑ Timothy Tyson: The Blood of Emmett Till . Ed .: Simon & Schuster. New York 2017, ISBN 978-1-4767-1484-4 , pp. 320 .
- ↑ Drake Lyrics ( English ) AZLyrics. Retrieved March 26, 2019.
- ↑ Hanno Rauterberg : Dance of the guardians of virtue . In: Die Zeit from July 27, 2017, p. 37.
- ↑ 'What We Left Behind' Doc Unveils 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' Season 8 Starship from trekmovie.com, accessed October 22, 2018.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Till, Emmett |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Till, Emmett Louis (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | american murder victim (racism) |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 25, 1941 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chicago , Illinois |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 28, 1955 |
| Place of death | Money , Mississippi |