The 80th Birthday of a Civil Rights Icon
Somewhere on the south side of Chicago, a slender, handsome man sits around a table in the back room of his favorite restaurant with his wife, children, grandchildren, and lifelong friends to celebrate the wonderful occasion of his 80th birthday.
Born and bred in the Windy City, he has spent most of his eight decades there, except for summers as a teenager in the Mississippi delta, where he would go to visit his uncle and cousins. He finished high school in Chicago and became the first in his family to go to college.
He got a job right after graduation and found a career he enjoyed. He married his high school sweetheart in 1963. He had two children and led a mostly quiet and unassuming life, raising his kids not too far away from where he lived with his mother, Mamie.
As he looks back on his life — as many do when they reach certain milestones — he does so with pride, appreciation, and probably a little regret, but mostly for the roads not taken. Overall, he loves his family more than anything and has been happy with the progress he has seen in his long life — from the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 60’s to the technological progress of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, to the inauguration of the first black president. He was utterly devastated — as many were — by the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020 but was encouraged by the outpouring of grief and cries for justice that followed. He knows in his heart that we still have a long way to go as a country in building a more perfect union.
The man celebrating his 80th birthday on this warm night in 2021 was born in Chicago on Friday, July 25, 1941 — just months before the United States entered World War II and the fabric of American life changed forever.
His name is Emmett Louis Till.
Of course, the later portion of the above life story is fabricated.
Emmet Till was born on July 25, 1941 — 80 years ago today.
He did, in fact, spend one summer with his great-uncle and cousins in Money, Mississippi.
But it was only the summer of 1955. It was his last summer on Earth.
He never finished high school, never had the chance to go to college, never fell in love, never married, and never had children, let alone grandchildren.
Before sunrise on August 28, 1955, when Emmett was just 14 years old, he was brutally kidnapped and murdered by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, two white men, supposedly for the offense of whistling at Bryant’s wife, Carolyn, the day before (this detail remains disputed). Till was taken away in a truck from his uncle’s house in the middle of the night, never to be seen alive again.
Three days later, his swollen body was found by two boys fishing in a nearby river. He had been shot in the face and his eye was dislodged from the socket (a 2005 report upon exhumation found a broken femur, two broken wrists, and a .45 caliber bullet in his skull). In the days that followed, there were calls for justice around the country. His mother, Mamie, made the gut-wrenching decision for Emmett’s funeral to be open-casket. Upon seeing her son’s mutilated body, she said:
There was just no way I could describe what was in that box. No way. And I just wanted the world to see.
The body of Emmett Till was viewed by tens of thousands of people in Chicago at the beginning of September 1955. He was buried in a simple grave in Burr Oak Cemetery, just south of the city.
The two men accused of his murder were acquitted but brazenly admitted to the heinous crime the following year in a Look magazine interview. Double jeopardy allowed them to escape further prosecution but they lived the rest of their lives as pariahs, virtually in hiding.
Emmett Till’s killing had repercussions beyond Mississippi and long after 1955. Mamie Till’s decision about the open casket was more consequential than she could have ever imagined at the time. The photos, in Jet magazine and The Chicago Defender (both black publications), sparked outrage and calls for retribution in black — and some white — communities of the mid-1950s as only visual proof of a crime against a child could have had.
Medgar Evers, the field secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi who was later assassinated in 1963, rose to local prominence following Till’s murder. His widow, Myrlie, said that the crime:
…shook the foundations of Mississippi — both black and white because … with the white community … it had become nationally publicized … with us as blacks … it said, even a child was not safe from racism and bigotry and death.
Only three months after the execution of Till, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and changed the course of the next half-century. She later said:
I thought of Emmett Till and I just couldn’t go back.
We’re glad she couldn’t.
How would the world be different if the life story of the man described above had been allowed to play out by fate? How would the history of the civil rights movement and American history have shifted — even so slightly — if Emmett Till had been permitted to live the life he deserved?
Sadly, we will never know. But anyone who cares about justice and appreciates the work of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, C.T. Vivian, and John Lewis must equally remember the name — and the sacrifice — of Emmett Till.
Especially today… on his birthday.
