EduClaytion

I’m always amazed at how America ranks its national heroes.  Since President Ronald Reagan’s 1983 bill-signing and Pres. George H.W. Bush’s 1992 proclamation, all 50 states have used this day to honor Martin Luther King Jr. for his leadership and sacrifice during the modern civil rights movement.  Today will give way to a month  of focusing on black history and folks like Rosa Parks.  Despite all these remembrances, speeches and textbooks across the country will continue to ignore the most important spark that motivated these honored icons. 

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In 1954, a 14-year-old boy left Chicago for a trip to Mississippi.  Within a few days, he was abducted and brutally murdered for “talking fresh” to a white woman.  This “violation” consisted of little more than a light-hearted whistle and a wink.  His killers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, beat and shot him then attached a cotton gin fan to the body with barbed wire and sank the corpse in the Tallahatchie River.  A local boy found the body three days later. 

Emmett’s mother Mamie, another strong woman often left out of the history books, ordered the caretaker to open the coffin.  Horrific sights and smells escaped.  She then demanded that no attempt be made to fix her boy.  The funeral would be open casket.  The pictures were also run by Jet magazine and are easy enough to find with Google but be forewarned if you don’t handle that type of thing well.  

The impact of the images and assistance of media helped bring the story into a national light by September 1955 when the trial took place.  In a segregated courtroom, eyewitnesses identified the accused men.  The jury listened to the testimony but also heard the judge say, “I’m sure every last Anglo-Saxon one of you has the courage to free these men.”  They did and even took an hour to grab a cola across the street before delivering the verdict.  Not guilty. 

Shortly after the trial, Milam and Bryant accepted $4,000 each to give the true account of what really happened.  Thanks to our double jeopardy law, they could not be tried again even upon admitting guilt.  In a blow-by-blow account, they detailed the murder including how enraged they became when Emmett refused to properly fear them.  Blacks and civil rights supporters were outraged.  They took action. 

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Segregation in the public sphere was being challenged through 1955, but the story of Emmett Till ignited the movement.  No one can claim coincidence at the fact that Rosa Parks got herself arrested just weeks after the Till verdict came down.  Just four days before refusing to give up her seat on that bus, Parks had attended a mass meeting in Alabama that focused on the murder of Till and two other men.  At this same time, Martin Luther King Jr. emerged as a primary leader in the movement.  

Good luck finding more than a paragraph in a textbook on this significant saga, but listen to people who were there describe the impact of these events in 1954-55.  You can find the Emmett Till story with plenty of original footage in a powerful video on Youtube.  Probably 70-80% of my students have never heard of this incident by the time they hit my class.  I don’t know why that is.  

I like to watch the “I Have  A Dream Speech” every year on this day.  A movement is made up of many leaders and sacrifices, but I always know that when King gave his speech in Washington D.C., he was remembering some specific folks like Emmett and Mamie Till.