Thursday, February 13, 2025, 9:12PM |  34°
MENU
Advertisement
Timothy Tyson, author of
2
MORE

Book review: 'Blood of Emmett Till' shows how lynching helped launch a movement

Book review: 'Blood of Emmett Till' shows how lynching helped launch a movement

A couple of years ago, I spoke at the annual William Faulkner conference in Oxford, Miss. The organizers arranged a bus tour of the Mississippi Delta so that Yankees like me could gawk at old cotton gins and blues crossroads and languid delta rivers. Among the stops was a decrepit wood-frame storefront, Bryant’s Grocery, in the tiny hamlet of Money, an unremarkable place that nonetheless gave us all a chill.

Bryant’s Grocery is one of many seemingly ordinary sites in the South marked by a vicious crime. Here in August 1955, a 14-year-old black youth from Chicago, Emmett Till, allegedly flirtatiously approached Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. Several days later, Emmett’s body surfaced, tortured and mutilated, in the nearby Tallahatchie River. Ms. Bryant’s husband Roy and his half-brother J.W. Milam were indicted, tried, and quickly acquitted. Almost immediately, “the Emmett Till case” came to epitomize the state-sanctioned racial terrorism in the South.


"THE BLOOD OF EMMETT TILL"
By  Timothy B. Tyson
Simon & Schuster ($27).

Of all of the thousands of Southern lynchings since the Civil War, why did this one capture the attention not just of the nation, but of the world? Why did this trial elicit such outrage? What, in other words, made the Emmett Till case so indelible?

Advertisement

In “The Blood of Emmett Till,” Timothy B. Tyson argues that public revulsion at Emmett’s murder and his killers’ acquittal, in conjunction with the ongoing Montgomery bus boycott, gave a crucial boost to the civil rights movement, which had been brewing for years without capturing American public attention. The sickening brutality of the crime, and Emmett’s mother Mamie’s brave insistence that the world see her boy’s ruined body at the funeral, made this crime a tipping point.

Mr. Tyson, author of the prizewinning “Blood Done Sign My Name,” starts not with Emmett’s trip to Bryant’s Grocery but with his family history. Like so many other participants in the Great Migration north, Emmett’s mother had fled Mississippi for Chicago, but still had family there, whom Emmett was visiting when he was abducted.

Along with offering vivid portraits of Southern transplants in Chicago’s “Black Belt,” Mr. Tyson illustrates the repressive social system that lower-class Mississippi whites such as Ms. Bryant had to navigate, and the power that sheriffs and country judges wielded over their poor, uneducated citizens. Those who ran this system pitted poor whites against blacks in order to maintain their dominance.

News, and the ghastly pictures, of the crime quickly spread across the country and abroad. While the white press of the time covered the crime as another regrettable example of the South’s peculiar folkways, the nation’s network of black newspapers (including the influential Pittsburgh Courier) worked hard to stoke moral outrage.

Advertisement

After the world press picked up the story, William Faulkner himself addressed the Emmett Till crime at a Rome press conference. “If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children,” he answered, “we don’t deserve to survive and probably won’t.”

This powerful, moving book doesn’t feature much groundbreaking new research. Mr. Tyson’s sources were largely previously public — newspaper accounts, congressional hearings, press releases, political speeches. But he has expertly unearthed and synthesized them to give a fuller picture than we’ve ever had of the minute-by-minute details of the crime, and of what people were saying and thinking about the Emmett Till case as it unfolded. It will certainly be the definitive account of this crucial catalyst for the civil rights struggle.

What new information that Mr. Tyson offers is sickening but not surprising. Carolyn Bryant, Emmett’s “victim,” testified in the 1955 trial that Emmett had grabbed her and talked in obscene terms about how he’d seduced white women before. The prohibition against sexual contact between black men and white women was the cornerstone of white supremacy, and so to any Mississippi jury Emmett’s actions merited immediate retaliation. But in a 2008 interview with Mr. Tyson, Ms. Bryan disavowed her damning testimony, admitting that none of it was true. Emmett Till had never touched her. It was all a lie.

Greg Barnhisel is Professor and Chair of the Dept. of English, Duquesne University.

 

 

First Published: February 26, 2017, 5:00 a.m.

RELATED
SHOW COMMENTS (0)  
Join the Conversation
Commenting policy | How to Report Abuse
If you would like your comment to be considered for a published letter to the editor, please send it to letters@post-gazette.com. Letters must be under 250 words and may be edited for length and clarity.
Partners
Advertisement
A cutout batter sits in the bullpen at Pirate City, the spring training facility of the Pittsburgh Pirates, during a spring training baseball workout in Bradenton, Fla., Sunday, Feb. 22, 2015.
1
sports
Joe Starkey: Bad news Pirates outdid themselves on Day 1
The administration of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro -- shown last week delivering the annual budget address -- on Thursday filed a federal lawsuit against the Trump administration over the freeze of federal funding. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
2
news
Gov. Shapiro and Pa. agencies sue federal government over Trump administration funding freeze
Hockey legend Mario Lemieux hands Canada forward Sidney Crosby a commemorative banner prior to the first period of 4 Nations Face-Off hockey action against Sweden in Montreal, Wednesday, Feb. 12, 2025.
3
sports
Jason Mackey: Fenway Sports Group's tepid relationship with Mario Lemieux must improve
Salem’s Market beat out three other finalists in 2021 for the right to operate the Hill District store.
4
business
Hill District Salem's Market halting operations one year after opening
A customer picks up a dozen eggs to buy  in a Giant grocery store in McLean, Va. on Jan. 28, 2025.
5
news
These grocery stores around Pittsburgh have put purchase limits on eggs
Timothy Tyson, author of "Blood of Emmett Till."
"The Blood of Emmett Till" by Timothy B. Tyson
Advertisement
LATEST ae
Advertisement
TOP
Email a Story