so [Music] this is the muddy back woods tallahatchie river where a weighted body was found alleged to be that of young emmett dill i saw a hole which i presumed was a bullet hole and i could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side and i wonder was it necessary to shoot it here is money mississippi the home of roy bryant it was here that the chicago negro boy emma till is alleged to have paid unwelcome attention to rory bryant's most attractive wife when white women's was on the streets you had to get off the street that was a way of life [Music] and all a white woman would have to say was that [ __ ] kind of looked at me me so we're talking about a way of life that in this part of the country that was enforced by law this was the home of moe's right it was from this shack the state alleges emmett till was taken by roy bryant and j.w milam the house was as dark as a thousand midnight she couldn't see it was like a nightmare i mean i mean someone come and stand over you with a pistol one hand a flashlight you're 16 years old it's a terrifying experience [Music] the teal case held the whole system up for inspection by the rest of the country and by the rest of the world it was the beginning of the focusing on the problems between the races in the deep south that culminated in the ultimate civil rights battles of the of of the rest of the 50s and and into the 60s i think black people's reaction was so visceral and i think it was probably more than anything else in terms of the mass civil rights movement the spark that launched it everybody knew we were under attack and that attack was symbolized by the attack on a 14 year old boy [Music] [Music] so [Music] go [Music] when one drives through the lowest hills and looks out at the sweep of those fields below flat as a pancake as far as the eye can see it's breathtaking those who have not been to the delta uh find themselves gasping at the site as they come over the lowest hills and see that expanse of flat agricultural land it was the summer of 1955 when emmett till arrived in mississippi from chicago his family had worked cotton for generations but this trip would be emmett's introduction to the delta known as the most southern place on earth this is mississippi today a situation exists in mississippi that is unlike the situation in most states in the nation in some sections of the state there is a preponderance of colored citizens this situation has brought problems it has created challenges but most important of all it has inspired a social system to meet the challenge in every community in mississippi there is segregation of the races drinking fountains are segregated restrooms are segregated the local theater is segregated you left in the balcony in any way said anything that they didn't like you didn't disagree with them on a whole you just didn't do that if a white person did something to you you had no recourse at all people disappeared we don't know what happened to them they just disappeared [Music] in the 75 years before emmett till set foot in mississippi more than 500 black people had been lynched in the state most were men who had been accused of associating with white women [Music] part of that culture was that the women were put on pedestals and they were some sort of uh idealization of of whatever it means to be woman or to be female there was an almost irrational fear of black men as if every black man was ready to attack or rape a white woman if you gave him a chance i can remember when my father died sammy the black man he worked for him was there and i threw my arms around his neck and he pulled away from me he could not have that you know physical show of affection of sharing grief or whatever black men did not touch white women many white southerners perhaps most deep south southerners had convinced themselves that black people were relatively happy in their in their segregated relationships with white people most white people i think had had convinced themselves that this was a defensible social system in which they lived [Music] i had a cousin that was living in mississippi and was walking down the side walk down near downtown and tunica and didn't get off the side walking the man slapped him and knocked him off the sidewalk and he got up instead of killing the white man like he wanted he just started walking and never stopped until he got to memphis and never stopped until he got up to chicago [Music] hundreds of thousands of black people fled mississippi for chicago in the years between the world wars one-way train fare of 11.10 took them to a different world [Music] neighborhoods and schools were segregated but the city offered a kind of freedom black mississippians could only dream about chicago was a land of promise and they thought that milk and honey was everywhere and so it was a lot of excitement leaving the south leaving the cotton fields you could hold your head up in chicago [Music] mamie carthan arrived in chicago at the age of two and only child young mamie was the hope of her family of former sharecroppers she graduated from high school at the top of her class and became one of the first black women in town to hold a civil service job in 1940 mamie married soldier louis till and one year later their son emmett was born in 1945 mamie got word that private till had died in europe all she received of his possessions was a signet ring inscribed with his initials lt emmett her only child was four years old a childhood case of polio left him with a stutter but by the time he was a teenager emmett till had grown into a cocky self-assured boy who loved to be the center of attention when we first met we were in gym uh in mr long's gym period i remember emmett raising his shirt up to about his navel let's start making his belly roll just waves of fat rolling and it just broke us up i mean the whole gym went crazy he was that kind of kid anything going on he's in the middle of all of it and he just loved play ball he just loved jokes he would pay people to tell him jokes if there was a group there emmy was in front and he was the lively one he was the one that everybody kind of looked to not your one leader [Music] in june of 1955 black chicago swung to a new kind of music called rock and roll a supreme court decision had struck down school segregation the year before emmett finished seventh grade and in july he turned 14. [Music] i knew in matild we went to grammar school together and emmett was a fun young man just like any other young teenager the boys wore polyester pants crepe sold shoes i would wear flared skirts with the crindle underneath you must have the crindling and we were doing the bop that's the bebop and we just danced and had fun and we were just all good friends in august emmett's great uncle mose wright visited chicago and invited emmett and his cousin wheeler home to mississippi before she let them go mamie schooled the boys on the ways of the south i let them know that mississippi was not chicago and when you go to mississippi you're living by an entirely different set of rules uh it is yes ma'am and no ma'am yes sir a dozer and bo if you see a white woman coming down the street you get off the sidewalk and drop your head don't even look at her the concern for emmett was that he could be with his fun-loving free-spirited way of living he could get in trouble could have a lot of problems he was 14 but he just turned 14 just 13 a few weeks before we went down there he thought i was exaggerating which i was i was trying to exaggerate if i could go high enough i things could see us soak into his head that you have to be very careful [Music] as emmett packed his bags mississippi was set to explode two black men had recently been killed for registering black voters and a push to implement the new law on school desegregation had whites from the delta to the state house spitting fire you are not going to permit [Music] [Applause] you are not going to permit the nascp to control your state it was argued in coffee shops all over the deep south that if we give on this then we'll we'll start giving on everything else and the first thing you know we won't have a segregated society and black people will be taking over in this part of the country a lot of the leadership was uh going around making outrageous threats and uh claiming they weren't gonna obey the law and that sort of thing consequences was that almost anything could happen to anybody at any time down there on august 19th mamie gave emmet the ring that it belonged to his father the next morning emmett and his mother grabbed his bags and rushed off to the 63rd street station he was running up the steps to try to make it to the train and i said emmett bo i called him bo i said where are you going you haven't kissed me goodbye and how do i know i'll ever see you again and he looked at me and he said oh mama he he kind of scolded me for saying something like that but he turned around he came back and uh he kissed me goodbye and he said here take this he pulled his watch off and gave it to me he said i won't need this where i'm going i said what about your ring he said oh i'm going to show it off to the fellas and with that he was up the steps and on his way to get on the train [Music] emmett rode the illinois central 16 hours out of chicago to the mississippi delta we went to south near the beginning of cotton picking time late august and we picked cotton for half a day we would go swimming run the snakes out the river we have a lot of fun [Music] emmett's family lived on the outskirts of money a whistle-stop town in the heart of delta cotton country the town of money was one street with maybe five or six stores but that's all just one one street wasn't much wasn't really a town at one end of money was brian's grocery which made a business of selling candy to black kids and provisions to field hands from nearby plantations roy bryant a 24 year old ex-soldier and his wife carolyn owned the grocery and not much else the bryants lived with their two boys in cramped rooms behind the store roy's half brother j.w milam helped out around the grocery the 235 pound milam was a hard-drinking man with a reputation for being tough on anyone who got in his way on a steamy wednesday afternoon emmett and seven other teenagers piled into moe's wright's old ford and headed to bryant's the day that we went to the store and money we were picking cotton first half of the day in the second half because it was so hot my uncle drove the car and we took off to money to get some refreshments just general things you buy in a store roy bryant was out of town leaving his wife carolyn alone behind the counter when emmett and his cousins pulled up other customers were sitting outside talking and playing checkers in the cool of the shade one or two at a time the boys drifted into the store and back out again with a cold drink or a piece of candy then emmett went in and bought two cents worth of bubble gum according to witnesses on his way out of the store emmett turned to carolyn bryant and whistled she stormed out we all got scared and someone said she's going to get a pistol that's when we became afraid so she's going to the car to get a pistol and as she went to the car we all jumped in my uncle's car i'm going pretty fast and dust is flying behind us and of course emmett till begged us not to tell our grandfather where it took place and we didn't this was on a wednesday and we didn't tell them we're taking place so wednesday went by thursday went by nothing friday we forgot about it sunday morning about 2 30 or i heard a voice at the door and they said this is mr bryant and said they wanted the boy that didn't talk at money and when i opened the door that was a man standing with a pistol in one hand and flashlight another it was like a nightmare i mean i mean someone come and stand over you with a pistol one hand a flashlight you're 16 years old this is a terrifying experience very terrifying and so we marched around through two rooms and i found the bar in the third room in the bed with my better boy and they told him to get up and put his clothes on moe's right pleaded with the two men he's only 14 and he's from up north why not give the boy a whipping right begged and leave it at that the two in the next room cousin and uncle they never woke up my uncle sammy did wake up but they told him to go back to sleep he's 12 years old and i just say hey i'm fixing to die j.w milam turned to moe's right how old are you preacher he asked 64 wright replied you make any trouble you'll never live to be 65. yeah to the car they asked the question is this the right one and i heard a boy say yes and they drove off towards money with nobody talked to anybody the house was as dark as a thousand midnight she couldn't see and when they left i was still afraid and so i'm waiting for them to come back there was a sunday morning early sunday morning [Music] i was uh playing beside the road and i saw uh mr uh milo's name truck coming by and it had uh had a cup over there we called the tarpon and i heard somebody hollering on the truck i could hear all this beating and i could hear this beating and i could hear this crying and crying and beat and i'm saying to myself they beating somebody up there i heard that even before i got to even before i got to the barn i passed they still would be they still would be not heavy milo came out so he said uh did you hear anything i saw him he had a khaki pants on had a green island shape and a 45 on his side so i said no i said i ain't hitting anything i said anything i was coming through there that moaning too tight was our deck washing the truck out i watched in general mylon's truck out i said all that blood come from he laid the boy lay as we did he said there's a shoe here he wanted shoes here i said oh that's the way i say i say who every tail shoot in chicago a desperate mamie till notified the local newspapers of emmett's disappearance in mississippi the family alerted the sheriff and then began to search for any sign of the boy along riverbanks and under bridges where black folks always look emmett's uncle said when something like this happens the next day roy bryant was arrested for kidnapping j.w milam was at a store in nearby mentor city when the leflore county sheriff caught up with him said that up here i got a wreck for you you throw the head up there like this he spoke about it again what a weekend see i got a rich feeling is he going hell no that's you talking it's no longer than two hours the high shave come back and i said come on in there and didn't even knock on the door nothing walked in there and said get up i come at you i'm okay dead alive you want to get ready to go [Music] on august 31st three days after emmett tiller disappeared a boy fishing in the tallahatchie noticed a body caught on a gnarled route in the muddy water he informed tallahatchie county sheriff clarence strider my dad called me and asked me did i have a boat in the river and i told him i did then he said well we'll be down there in a little while and he sent deputies down here to go with me and we took the boat and went up the river it was in a curve in the drift and the foot was sticking up and we tore into the drift and got to him and no got him out [Music] then we carried him up to the other landing and put him in hers emmett's body had been weighed down with a 75 pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire the boy was so badly beaten that moe's right could identify emmett only by his father's ring [Music] mamie till was in chicago surrounded by worried family and friends when she was told that her only child was dead those words were like arrows sticking all over my body my eyes were so full of tears until i couldn't see and when i began to make the announcement oh that emmett had been found and how he was found the whole house began to scream and to cry and that's when i realized that this was a load that i was gonna have to carry i wouldn't get any help carrying the slope by the time mimi received her son's body back in chicago two weeks after she had kissed him goodbye emmett's murder was front page news his body was taken to a funeral home owned by a.a raynor who had promised mississippi authorities that he would keep the casket nailed shut when mamie till asked him to open it up raynor refused i asked him mr raynor do you have a hammer i said i haven't signed anything and i haven't made any promises and if you can't open those box that box i can we opened the casket there was a terrible odor that came from the body because the body had been in the water and began to deteriorate mr rainer was he told the mother he said if i was you i wouldn't look at this body but this body is such a horrible condition she said mr raynor i want to see my son and i decided then that i would start at his feet and work my way up maybe gathering strength as i went i paused at his midsection because i knew he would not want me looking at him but i saw enough that i knew he was intact i kept on up until i got to his chin and then i i was forced to deal with his face i saw that his tongue was choked out i noticed that the right eye was lying on midway his cheek i noticed that his nose had been broken like somebody took a meat chopper and chopped his nose in several places as i kept looking i saw a hole which i presumed was a bullet hole and i could look through that hole and see daylight on the other side and i wondered was it necessary to shoot it mr raynor asked me he said do you want me to touch the body up i said no mr rayna let the people see what i've seen i i was just willing to bear it all i think everybody needed to know what had happened to emmett till mamie's decision would make her son's death a touchstone for a generation at a church on the south side of chicago emmett till's mutilated body would be on display for all to see it was on a sunday afternoon i won't ever forget it was a sunday afternoon the church was very calm the line was very orderly i thought that pretty soon the crowd would die down i looked like all of chicago was there well they brought their children with them because emily was 14 years old and they wanted the younger kids to see what happened to emmett they were mad they were angry in chicago had seen emmett till's corpse with their own eyes when the black magazine jet ran photos of the body black americans across the country shuttered it was grotesque i mean it was just it blew my mind i couldn't sleep at night it was traumatic for me for for months i mean it touched us all mainstream newspapers and magazines spread the story of the 14 year old black boy who'd been brutally killed for whistling at a white woman it stunned white america most white americans at that time were saying things such as the emmett till murder had happened back in slavery times that these kinds of things were not of their generation that they no longer happened in america and this said to them clearly hey it's right here it is now [Music] bryant and j.w milam admitted having taken emmett till but claimed they'd let him go now with the eyes of the nation turning to mississippi the state appointed a special prosecutor and file charges final indictment is that they did willfully unlawfully the longest land of their malice forethought killing murder emmett till a human being scores of reporters descended on the delta television networks chartered a plane to send footage to new york for the nightly news the associated press fielded queries from paris copenhagen tokyo the till case had become a major international news story under the glare of the spotlight white mississippians began to close ranks local stores collected ten thousand dollars in countertop jars for bryant and milam every lawyer in the county joined their defense team people of the socioeconomic level of the two defendants in this case were obviously looked down on by the uh more aristocratic whites uh almost uh with the same disdain that they looked down on on blacks but they were still white folks and when push came to shove the white community write it in support of them against a a young black person for whom they had even greater disdain the atmosphere among whites in tallahatchie county and other the whole surrounding area was one of absolute scoring at the fact that these men were being put on trial for their lives and the cynicism uh was uh usually couched in very crude jokes one of them was uh in that just like a [ __ ] to swim across the tallahatchie river with a gin fanned around his neck i can't understand how a civilized mother could put a dead body of a child on public display i'm almost convinced that the very beginning of this was by a communistic front well sir i tell you right now if he gets justice they'll turn him a loose if i was on the grand jury that is what i would do among african americans there was outright fear two tight collins who worked for j.w milam and had been seen washing blood from milam's truck disappeared the message to black people was clear hide what you know hide even what you think or face the consequences young man do you think these two men should be indicted i don't know what do you mean you don't know i'll know this you're not have you studied the case by reading the papers perhaps yes and you don't know whether they should be invited those indicted yes thank you very much on september 19th less than three weeks after emmett's body was found roy bryant and j.w milam's trial for murder opened in sumner mississippi which touted itself as a good place to raise a boy the air in the courtroom a reporter wrote was as heavy and oppressive as the moss that hangs from the cypress trees in the courtroom they recorded 118 degrees and of course there was no air conditioning they had the ceiling fans that were only stirring the air up making it hotter when it reached your body on the first day of the trial presiding judge curtis swango named the jury all white men from bryant and milam's home county i remember looking at the at that jury and even though i knew a good many of the men who owned the jury and and they looked mean to me i would faith have gone up against any of those guys tallahatchie county sheriff and plantation owner clarence strider was responsible for locating witnesses and gathering evidence against bryant and milam sheriff strider was the big fat plain talking obscene talking sheriff you would expect to find in the south his actions at the trial were more i think he was not just so much to see justice of what was going on but be sure that his courtroom was totally segregated the man had laid it out that we got 22 seats over here for you white boys and we got four seats so we have a few colored boys we don't mix them down here we ain't gonna mix them and we don't intend to you ain't gonna be with the white folks and the white folks ain't gonna be with you and y'all buy bees bacon but ain't gonna be no love loveness between black and white folk strider consigned black reporters and detroit congressman charles diggs to a card table on the sidelines strider greeted them as he passed with a cherry hello [ __ ] we never have any trouble until some of our southern [ __ ] go up north and naacp talks to them and they come back home if they will keep their nose and miles out of our business we'll be able to do more it will enforce in the laws of tallahassee county and mississippi the reaction of reporters from out of the south was one of just absolute amazement they knew that there were strange things going on down in places like sumner but they did not know it would be quite like that they were really surprised at uh at what they found at the same time of course they wrote about it with great relish because it was a good story it had sex it had murder it had mystery [Music] when mamie till arrived she had to make her way through an unsympathetic crowd gathered on the courthouse lawn what do you intend to do here today to answer any questions that might that the attorneys might ask you to answer how do you think you could possibly be a help to them i don't know i mean just by answering every question that they asked me do you have any evidence bearing on this case i do know that this is my son mamie till testified that the body she'd examined and buried was indeed her son in their cross-examination bryant and milam's attorneys peppered her with hostile questions and then presented the main argument for the defense the corpse pulled from the tallahatchie river was not emmett till they summed up by saying isn't it true that you and the naacp got your heads together and you came down here and with their help you all dug up a body and you have uh claimed that body to be your son isn't it true that your son is in detroit michigan with his grandfather right now with sheriff strider and courtroom sentiment clearly on the side of the defendants reporters began their own desperate search for witnesses black people wasn't speaking out about the immature case at that particular time because they knew that it could happen to them the blacks feared for they for their lives and for their family life because it was it was those white folks were for real so it was just you know like uh hush hush you know so i was told to keep my mouth shut and that's what i did two days into the trial reporters got a lead on a young sharecropper named willie reed who might be willing to talk i was in the cotton field and i was picking i was picking cotton picking cotton and i looked because the feeling was about so many people coming across the field towards me was white and black coming that way and then they began to question me about this here did you see anything so i told them what i saw putting his life at risk willie reed agreed to step forward when you walk in that courtroom and uh you know what you that you're gonna testify then you look at all these white folks and everybody looking at you they got their frowns on their face and everything you see them they be looking at you rolling out looking at you yeah white looking it was reed spoke in a voice barely louder than a whisper he'd seen roy bryant j.w milam and one other white man with emmett till early that sunday morning and had heard the sounds of a beating coming from milam's shed after delivering his testimony reed was smuggled out of mississippi when he reached chicago he was hospitalized with a nervous breakdown the prosecution's best witness was mose wright who had clearly seen the men who took emmett till from his home wright had been in hiding since the night of the kidnapping and had been threatened with death but there in the searing heat of a delta courtroom the 64-year-old sharecropper had his say one of the attorneys asked do you know the man that came to your house that night to get emmett till out of your house moe's right stood and pointed first at roy bryant then at jw milam thar he he said wright later claimed he could feel the blood boil and hundreds of white people in the courtroom but he said i had decided to tell it like it was that was a dramatic moment and it took an awful lot of courage for him to get up there and do what he did i think he had decided that he was going to do it no matter what happened after he testified wright left his cotton blooming in the field his old car sitting at the station and slipped onto the train to chicago he would never again live in mississippi the trial drew to a close after only five days in his summation the lead defense attorney warned members of the jury that their ancestors would turn over in their graves if bryant and milam were found guilty last anglo-saxon one of you he said has the courage to free these men as the jury retired the black people who were standing around the walls begin to ease out of the door i said it's time for us to go congressman diggs say what i missed the verdict i said congressman this is one verdict you don't want to be present to hear the crowd in the courtroom waited in the heat reporters overheard members of the jury laughing and joking in the jury room in just over an hour the jury returned in the emmett till murder trial the all-white jury has acquitted the two white defendants accused of killing the 14 year old negro youth the jury foreman said the deciding factor was the state's failure to prove the identity of the body pulled from a river near sumner mississippi a juror later revealed that the jury had stalled to make it look good they wouldn't have taken so long to return to the courtroom he said if they hadn't stopped to drink pop the verdict came in not guilty you could hear guns firing i mean it was almost like a fourth of july celebration or it was almost as if the white sox had won the pennant in the city of chicago it was just uh it was just oh it was a mess [Music] after the trial sheriff clarence strider told reporters i hope the chicago [ __ ] and the naacp are satisfied people are used to doing things normal around here and they just tried to run the thing they thought they could run over the judge and the sheriff and everybody over there they thought that they no could just take over but they didn't how do you folks feel now it's all over roy how about you i'm just glad it's over jw hi i'm doing mrs bryant [Music] reports of the acquittal made front-page headlines across the united states and set off an international firestorm the life of a negro in mississippi one european paper observed is not worth a whistle from boston to los angeles black people packed meeting halls and spilled into the streets to hear mamie till tell her story and what i saw was a shame before god and man and the way the jury chose to believe the ridiculous stories of the defense attorneys i i just can't go into detail to tell you that silly things these stupid things that were brought up as probabilities and they swallowed it like a fish swallowed the hook just anything just any excuse to equip these two men protected from further prosecution roy bryant and j.w milam sold their story to a reporter from look magazine for four thousand dollars their account appeared just four months after the acquittal we took them and we was just going to whip them scare some sense into them back of the house is a tool shed two rooms about 12 feet square we walked them in there and took turns smashing them across the head with the 45 first my brother and then me we put them back in the truck and we knew what we was going to do there's a spot about a mile a half from the bridge where the banks are steep it was just a spot i held up the gun i fired and the chicago boy twisted around and caught it right in the air we tied the gin fan to his neck with barbed wire and rolled his body into 20 feet of muddy water for three hours that morning we had a big old fire in the yard damn if that [ __ ] didn't have crepes old shoes you know how hard they are to burn [Music] if there were others involved as willie reed and moe's wright had testified under oath milam and bryant did not name them mamie till went to washington to press the federal government to reopen the case despite thousands of letters protesting mississippi's handling of the murder president dwight eisenhower and fbi director j edgar hoover ruled out a federal investigation eisenhower didn't even answer mamie till's telegram [Music] no one ever did time for the killing of the 14 year old black boy from chicago [Music] but his murder and the trial and acquittal of his killers sent a powerful message if change was going to come people would have to put themselves on the line contributions to civil rights groups soared and 100 days after the death of emmett till rosa parks refused to give up her seat to a white person and the montgomery bus boycott began when people saw what had happened to my son men stood up who had never stood up before people became vocal who had never vocalized before emmett's death was the opening of the civil rights movement he was the sacrificial lamb of the movement [Music] i do believe that nationally or at least across the south the emmett till trial and the and the result of that trial somehow spurred the civil rights movement as if this was the last straw or maybe it was the spark people were thoroughly disgusted at what happened in that situation and it made an awful lot of people realize that they themselves had to get involved and do something it was just a magnificent reaction to a very ugly thing that had taken place in this country [Music] [Music] [Music] you