Remembering Emmett Till

Take a drive through the Mississippi Delta today and you’ll find a landscape dotted with memorials to major figures and events from the civil rights movement. Perhaps the most chilling are those devoted to the murder of Emmett Till, a tragedy of hate and injustice that became a beacon in the fight for racial equality. The ways this event is remembered have been fraught from the beginning, revealing currents of controversy, patronage, and racism lurking just behind the placid facades of historical markers.

In Remembering Emmett Till, Dave Tell gives us five accounts of the commemoration of this infamous crime. In a development no one could have foreseen, Till’s murder—one of the darkest moments in the region’s history—has become an economic driver for the Delta. Historical tourism has transformed seemingly innocuous places like bridges, boat landings, gas stations, and riverbeds into sites of racial politics, reminders of the still-unsettled question of how best to remember the victim of this heinous crime. Tell builds an insightful and persuasive case for how these memorials have altered the Delta’s physical and cultural landscape, drawing potent connections between the dawn of the civil rights era and our own moment of renewed fire for racial justice.

ISBN-13: 9780226559674

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Publication Date: 02-15-2021

Pages: 322

Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

Dave Tell is professor of communication studies and co-director of the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Kansas and the principal investigator of the Emmett Till Memory Project.

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CHAPTER 1

RACE, GEOGRAPHY, AND THE ERASURE OF SUNFLOWER COUNTY

On September 21, 1955, the Memphis Press-Scimitar published one of the first maps of Emmett Till's murder (see figure 2). It was a hand-drawn map of three counties: Leflore County, where Emmett Till whistled and from which he was kidnapped; Tallahatchie County, where the trial of killers Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam was then in session; and Sunflower County, where, one day later, Willie Reed would testify that he heard J. W. Milam beat Emmett Till. Every detail of the map was contested. The counsel for the defense argued that the entire Till affair should be confined to Leflore County. Their version of the story began and ended at Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi. It was there, they argued, that Till "assaulted" Carolyn Bryant. And it was there, they argued, that Carolyn's husband Roy and his half brother J. W. Milam turned Till loose after kidnapping him two and eight-tenths miles away.

The prosecution offered a different itinerary. As I noted in the introduction, the prosecution rooted the Till affair, not at the Bryant store in Money, but rather at the homestead of Till's uncle Moses Wright on Dark Fear Road (see figure 3). From this site in rural Leflore County, the prosecution argued, the killers took Till to a barn in Sunflower County where they killed him. It was outside this barn that Reed testified that he "heard the cries of a boy" and "noted with anxiety of soul that the cries gradually decreased until they were heard no more." After Till fell silent, the prosecution continued, the murderers wrapped his body in a tarpaulin and drove it to Tallahatchie County where they attached it to a cotton-gin fan with a length of barbed wire and sank it in the Tallahatchie River.

From the perspective of the defense, the geography of the murder was inextricably bound to the race of the victim. Defense lawyer Sidney Carlton instructed the jury that there was "nothing reasonable about the state's theory that Bryant and Milam kidnapped Till in Leflore County, drove several miles to a plantation in Sunflower County, then doubled back into Tallahatchie County to dump the body." His colleague John Whitten then added, "Every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men." Thus it was that the jury retreated to their chambers to consider two arguments, one about race and the other about geography. When they emerged sixty-seven minutes later, their acquittal was a referendum on both counts: the disposability of black lives was confirmed, and Sunflower County was officially excised from the itinerary of Till's murder. It would not appear on another map of Till's murder for nearly fifty years.

The long erasure of Sunflower County perfectly captures the complex entanglements of race, geography, and memory. The presence or absence of Sunflower County in Till's story has never been purely a question of geography. In the wake of the trial, the earliest commemorative efforts were driven by a young cadre of black writers for whom the inclusion of Sunflower County was a mechanism of protesting the Jim Crow legal process. The pattern held. For the next six decades, while Sunflower County moved in and out of Till's story (mostly out), its presence was indexed to far more than geospatial coordinates. As the location of Till's death shifted, so too did the mechanics of racism, the possibility of justice, the size of the murder party, and the identities of the perpetrators, as well as the roster of those who fought for justice. Indeed, there is hardly a variable in the entire story of Till's murder that is not modified by the presence or absence of Sunflower County. More than any other place in Mississippi, Sunflower County has served as a shorthand heuristic for the competing memories of Till's death.

As the memory of Till's lynching developed over the course of the century, questions of geography and racism were always at hand — and they were always interrelated. Sunflower County functioned as the relay point through which the variables of race, place, and memory bled one into the other. Through Sunflower County, questions of geography — of miles driven, of ground covered, of sites defiled, and of borders crossed — had elementary effects in the domain of race. The geospatial coordinates of Till's murder, for example, were always connected to the size of the murder party. As the geographic range of the murder fluctuated among one, two, or three counties, so too did the size of the murder party and, by extension, the percentage of that party who were never even brought to trial. Geography, in other words, was fundamentally indexed to the category of race, because the question of whether or not racial justice was even pursued hinged on the question of where, precisely, Till was killed. In the case of Sunflower County, racism has been, quite literally, measured in miles.

Just as geographic uncertainty had racial consequences, the particular story of Till's murder made possible by the exclusion of Sunflower County has had lasting effects on the landscape of the Delta. To this day, Sunflower County remains the only relevant county in the Delta without a single built memorial to Emmett Till. Unlike the two counties to its east, the spaces of which are fairly planted with memorials, Sunflower County has nothing. Its still-barren commemorative landscape is a material reminder of how memory, race, and place are bound together. Without a single memorial, it is as if the landscape of Sunflower County is shaping the contours of Till's story, limiting the murder party to no more than two, already acquitted men.

I tell the story of Sunflower County in three parts. I start by attending to the first posttrial commemorative work through which Sunflower County emerged as a topos of racial resistance. Although the jury did its best to eliminate the county from Till's itinerary, an impressive array of journalists refused to let the jury have the last word. In October 1955, after the black press had retreated to the safety of the urban North, they reinstated Sunflower County in order that they might expand the size of the murder party and thereby bring a greater range of injustice into view. From a space dismissed in the name of Anglo-Saxon courage, Sunflower County became a powerful argument for racial reform. It remained so until January of 1956.

While October 1955 was a brilliant moment of reemergence for Sunflower County, it would not last. Even as black journalists were forcibly reinserting the county into the narrative of Till's death from the safety of New York and Chicago, plans to eliminate the county for a second time were afoot in the Delta. Indeed, the same lawyers that once convinced the jury that the inclusion of Sunflower County was "not reasonable" were at it again, developing a memorial strategy that sanitized the murder and truncated the murder party — all by eliminating Sunflower County. This time it worked, and the second section explains how and why.

In the third section, I attend to the third attempt to eliminate Sunflower County from the memory of Till's murder. Here I track a gradually increasing disregard for the category of geography. Eventually, in the final decades of the twentieth century, the categories of race and place were disentangled. For the first time in the history of Till commemoration, it was possible to adjust the size of the murder party without adjusting the murder site. The effect of this was not to neutralize questions of geography by detaching them from questions of race. Rather, by pretending that geography was an autonomous field, it empowered geography by rendering its work less conspicuous. The sheer cultural power of a suddenly inconsequential geography came home to me in a very personal way in the summer of 2014. Till's cousin Simeon Wright told me that, in the grand scheme of things, it didn't matter where Till was killed; it only mattered that he was killed and that he was killed for being the wrong color at the wrong time in the wrong place. While I have great respect for the late Simeon Wright and the countless hours he invested in shepherding Till's memory, in this instance he was wrong. The erasure of Sunflower County provides compelling answers to the very questions about which Wright cared: questions of racism and justice. In the case of Till's commemoration, if we care about race, we also must care about geography — the two have always moved in tandem.

I conclude with the unlikely story of Ellen Whitten, granddaughter of defense lawyer John Whitten Jr. There is a strong note of irony here, as the Whitten family played a long and direct role in the repeated erasure of Sunflower County. It is, then, with a strong sense of poetic justice that, in 2005, Ellen Whitten reanimated Sunflower County and, for the first time in fifty years, put it back on a map of Till's murder.

The Rebirth of Sunflower County

The earliest posttrial commemorations of Till's murder were driven by an insistence on the relevance of Sunflower County — and all the implications that county brought with it. This crusade to remember Sunflower County was conducted primarily by one white journalist and a corps of black writers and activists who were in Mississippi for the trial. The white journalist was Clark Porteous of the Memphis Press-Scimitar. Because he was white, Porteous was able to publish the story of Sunflower County during the trial — in late September 1955. To be sure, the story was not his; he learned of Sunflower County only after the black press gave him the scoop. The group of black writers included the celebrated Afro-American correspondent James L. Hicks, Simeon Booker from Johnson Publications (Ebony-Jet), Moses Newson and L. Alex Wilson for the Tri-State Defender, Olive Arnold Adams, and the legendary Mississippi civil rights activist Dr. T. R. M. Howard. Although Hicks, Booker, Howard, and others (Ruby Hurley, Medgar Evers) discovered Sunflower County — and even went undercover as sharecroppers to substantiate its relevance — they could not publish their story during the trial simply because they were black. It would need to wait until October.

Hicks was haunted by his decision to withhold the story of Sunflower County. Eleven days after the trial ended, safely back in New York City, he explained, "I did not write it while in Mississippi for fear of bodily harm to myself and my colleagues." Although he was "ashamed" that he did not "throw caution to the wind" and tell the story as it was unfolding, he still believed that it could have cost him his life. "If I had tried this, I would not be here in New York to write this."

Right or wrong, Hicks and his colleagues did not publish the story as it emerged during the trial in September 1955. Although they fed portions of the story to Porteous, and although Porteous published an early map of Sunflower County (see figure 2), the majority of the story did not emerge until October 1955, two weeks after the trial. This means that the story of Sunflower County has always been historical revisionism. It was a form of commemoration designed to radically alter the terms of Till's story and, critically, those who participated in it. At the heart of the Sunflower County story was a fundamental rejection of the one-county theory offered by the defense, allowed to stand by the prosecution, and accepted by the jury. As I retell the story of Sunflower County's emergence in the weeks following the trial, I stress that more than geography was at issue. By moving the murder site and expanding the geographic range of the murder, the black press used Sunflower County to provide eyewitnesses to the murder, to expand the roster of perpetrators, and to demonstrate the prejudice of Jim Crow justice.

From the perspective of Till's murder and his memory, Sunflower County was born at midnight on September 18, 1955 — just eight hours before the trial was scheduled to begin. It was then that a plantation worker named Frank Young arrived at T. R. M. Howard's Mound Bayou home. Howard was an unparalleled force for racial justice in Mississippi. Although he is generally remembered for his 1951 founding of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, his civil rights credentials were vast.

Four years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he founded a mass nonviolent movement in the Mississippi Delta. From 1952–1955 he organized annual civil-rights rallies that sometimes attracted crowds of ten thousand, led a successful statewide boycott, and publicly faced down a segregationist governor. He not only hired Medgar Evers for his first job out of college but was instrumental in introducing him to the Civil Rights Movement.

In addition to his civil rights resume, by the time of Till's death, Howard was also the chief surgeon at the Taborian Hospital and an entrepreneur so wealthy that he drove only the latest model Cadillac.

From the perspective of Frank Young (and Till commemoration more broadly), the most important thing about Howard was his guns. Howard employed two security guards around the clock, stashed firearms "in every corner of every room," and kept a pistol lashed to his own waist. For these reasons, Howard's home in Bolivar County became the "black command center" during the trial, and it was, for the same reason, the preferred lodging for Till's mother, Mamie Bradley; African American congressman Charles C. Diggs; and other blacks whose connections to the Till trial rendered them potential targets of racial violence. The home provided shelter for black witnesses, space for strategy meetings, and, above all, safety.

As a witness to Till's murder, Frank Young must have known that, just as much as Diggs and Bradley, he too was a potential target of racial violence. When he arrived at the Howard home seeking safe harbor, he told Howard that Till had been killed inside a barn on the Sturdivant Plantation just west of the town of Drew, Mississippi, in Sunflower County. This was the first time Sunflower County had been mentioned in the context of Till's murder, and it had the potential to rewrite Till's itinerary in fundamental ways. "These revelations," historians write, "were earthshaking. They could provide eyewitness evidence of the kidnapping and possibly murder and shift the trial venue to Sunflower County."

Young's ability to locate the murder in Sunflower County would have come as a breath of fresh air to the prosecution, whose inability to locate the site of the murder was widely understood as a significant limitation. In articles written on the first and third day of the trial, Porteous reported that the state was "expected to have difficulty proving where the slaying took place" and that this difficulty was understood by the prosecution as a "weakness of its [own] case." Simeon Booker noted that a white reporter told him that the trial would be over quickly: "The State doesn't even know where this boy was killed." Before the trial even began, defense lawyer J. J. Breland predicted victory based in part on the prosecution's inability to prove that the murder "happened in the second judicial district of Tallahatchie County." This was indeed a difficult point to prove. As late as the second day of the trial — some thirty-six hours after Young appeared at Howard's home but still twenty-four hours before his story broke publicly — the print media was speculating that the trial may shift to Leflore County, the site of the whistle and kidnapping.

Young's testimony put many of these anxieties to rest, if only momentarily. He told Howard that Till had been conveyed via a crowded green pickup truck to the headquarters barn on the Ben W. Sturdivant Plantation (see figure 4). J. W. Milam knew the plantation well. Until May 1, 1954, he had an ownership stake in the plantation, and, at the time of the murder, his brother Leslie worked there as the "operating manager of farming operations." It was in the Sturdivant barn, Young believed, that Till was killed. In a written statement conveyed via Porteous to prosecuting attorneys Gerald Chatham and Robert Smith, and which Porteous eventually printed verbatim, Howard summarized Young's tale:

I am informed that a 1955 green Chevrolet truck with a white top was seen on the place [Sturdivant Plantation] at 6. A.M. Sunday, Aug. 28, the last time Till was seen alive. There were four white men in the cab and three negro men in the back. Photos of Till have been identified. He was in the middle in the back.

There are witnesses who heard the cries of a boy from the closed shed. They heard blows. They noted with anxiety of soul that the cries gradually decreased until they were heard no more.

Later a tractor was moved from the shed.

The truck came out with a tarpaulin spread over the back.

The Negroes who went into the shed were not seen at this time and have not been seen around the plantation since.

The essential thing to note in Howard's summary is that the size of the murder party ("four white men in the cab and three negro men in the back") was expanded by shifting the murder site. If Till was killed in Sunflower County, more persons than simply Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were involved. To the four white men and three black men (one of whom was Till) mentioned by Young, one also needs to add Leslie Milam — as manager of the Sturdivant Plantation he would have already been there when the truck arrived.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Remembering Emmett Till

1 Race, Geography, and the Erasure of Sunflower County
2 Of Race and Rivers: Topography and Memory in Tallahatchie County
3 Emmett Till, Tallahatchie County, and the Birthplace of the Movement
4 Ruins and Restoration in Money
5 Memory and Misery in Glendora
Conclusion: Vandalism and Memory at Graball Landing

Notes
Bibliography
Index