NEW
YORK - 20 May 2004 / www.MaximsNews.com
/ -- “The arc
of the moral universe is long,” Martin Luther King, Jr. often said, but it
bends toward justice.”
Perhaps
now, at long last, the arc of the moral universe will produce justice for
Emmett Till, murdered in Money, Mississippi nearly a half century ago.
In
this month and year when we mark so many important moments from the civil
rights years of the 1950s and 1960s, the name of Emmett Till—and the
question of whether justice will be done for him—continues to echo like a
quiet but insistent dirge.
Emmett
Till was not a civil rights activist. He
was just a 14-year-old black boy from Chicago sent by his mother that summer
to visit his Mississippi relatives.
But
there, as he and several friends whiled away an afternoon in town, Till, not
familiar with the rigid code of the Jim Crow South and egged on by a
companion, made a flippant remark, “Bye, baby,” to a white woman, Carolyn
Bryant, whose husband owned a local store.
With
that brief remark, his fate was sealed.
Several
nights later a gang of whites burst into the cabin of his uncle, Moses Wright,
and dragged Till from his bed.
Three
days later, his corpse, bearing signs of torture and his face horribly
disfigured, was recovered from the nearby Tallahatchie River.
When
her son’s body was returned to Chicago, Emmett Till’s mother, then Mamie
Till Bradley, insisted that the casket remain open at his funeral so that
“all the world [could] see what they did to my son.”
Even
before Till’s body was found, two white men, Roy Bryant, Carolyn Bryant’s
husband, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were arrested for his kidnapping.
But
the disgust local whites initially expressed at the murder vanished as the
case drew national attention.
Despite
being identified as two of the kidnappers by Moses Wright from the witness
stand in a dramatic courtroom confrontation, Bryant and Milam were acquitted
after the defendants’ attorneys urged the all-white jury to follow the
dictates of white supremacy.
The
jury verdict came on September 23, 1955—two days before the 166th
anniversary of the signing of the Bill of Rights.
This
month the Justice Department announced it has new evidence and will open a
criminal investigation into the case.
R.
Alexander Acosta, the federal assistant attorney general for civil rights,
indicated that information uncovered in the filming of two recent
documentaries on the case may lead them to identify more participants in the
crime.
Safely
acquitted, Bryant and Milam later
gleefully described torturing and killing Till in an interview for Look
Magazine.
They
are now dead. But federal
officials said others—there may have been as many as ten who participated in
or watched Till’s murder—who were never before charged could still be
brought to trial.
“We
owe it to Emmett Till, we owe it to his mother and to his family,” Mr.
Acosta said, “and we owe it to ourselves to see if, after all these years,
any additional measure of justice is still possible.”
A
product of the culture of the lynching of African Americans which infested the
South since the 1880s, the murder of Emmett Till and the injustice which
followed shocked even those blacks who fully understood that the racist laws
and customs of the Jim Crow South rested on the willingness of the region’s
white majority to commit or tolerate heinous violence.
It
laid bare the fundamental evil of the South’s system of Jim Crow in a way
that forced White America to consider what it was tolerating.
And
it deepened Black America’s resolve to carry forward the nonviolent campaign
for civil rights it was about to launch on a massive scale:
the Montgomery Bus Boycott that brought Martin Luther King, Jr. to
national attention was to begin that December.
Yet,
even as Emmett Till’s murder helped inspire civil rights activists to be
courageous, it was also one of those events which suffused the Movement with
an acute sense of the tragedy racism caused; and it has haunted Black America
ever since.
The
two men chiefly responsible for the crime escaped punishment, and, sadly,
Till’s mother died last year without seeing justice done.
Nonetheless,
it is especially appropriate that the effort to pursue justice for Emmett Till
be joined by the federal government this month.
It
follows a series of successful efforts over the past decade of Southern law
officials to bring perpetrators of civil rights-related murders of the 1950s
and 1960s to justice—a task which we should all recognize as one more facet
of the great legacy of the African-American struggle for
freedom.
To register for the
National Urban League Conference in Detroit, July 21 -25, call toll-free
1-800-263-9926, or register online at www.nul.org
And
don’t forget to do your duty in this important Election Year:
register to vote, and vote!
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