Emmett Till died before I was born.
Like many people, I had heard his story, now one of several recent federal investigations into unsolved Civil Rights-era murders.
Emmett Till was a black teenager from Chicago. He went to Mississippi in 1955 to visit relatives. He came home in a coffin.
His funeral made him a historic reference.
Emmett’s mother insisted that the body be brought back to Chicago and be given a public viewing. His horribly disfigured body went on public display. Mourners looked upon a body bloated by several days in the river, a skull split open by either a gunshot or an ax.
People fainted at the sight. But they remembered. They remembered both Emmett and the senseless way he died. So what could a reporter possibly say that would be new?
A lot.
My goal was to approach Emmett’s story not so much from the angle of race or the brutality of his murder.
The usual question-and-answer style of interviewing wouldn’t work, either. Rather, the route was to simply have long conversations with the people who knew Emmett the little boy. Their thoughts led the way.
I’ve spent nearly three years talking with many of the people closest to Emmett: his mother, up until her death; the two cousins he followed to Mississippi; the two filmmakers who convinced people, long silent about the murder, to talk; and the self-taught legal activist who led federal prosecutors to believe there might be reason to open the case.
I had the luxury of time passed. The basic details of Emmett’s story are so well-known that I could concentrate on the tangents. And there, tangled into the family pain, are details. Buried in the overarching narrative are nuggets of stories that offer a broader explanation about the time Emmett lived in, and why it has been so hard to lay him to rest.
At one point I wrote this about Emmett: “…grief doesn’t always subside. Sometimes it rises, rolling through the generations, gathering up more victims as families try to move on but get lost in the struggle.”
Take Simeon Wright, Emmett’s cousin. Wright lay beside Emmett, sharing the bed with his cousin on the night of the kidnapping. He was 12 years old. By daybreak, Simeon knew his cousin wasn’t coming back.
He stayed in Mississippi through the trial, but eventually he had to restart life in Chicago. In one conversation, Simeon, now a retired pipe fitter, recalled in exact detail the trees that had been planted around the family home. He spoke of the persimmon trees, climbing them, laying under them. How Emmett was no good at tree climbing.
He was a grown man, longingly recounting a childhood interrupted. He acknowledges he grew up and became bitter. He got into fights. He had a chip on his shoulder. Or he was always looking over his shoulder. He is not sure when the two attitudes blurred.
He remembered how broken his father, Emmett’s great-uncle, had been after the murder forced him to leave Mississippi. He talked about listening to his father’s footsteps at night. The man was unable to sleep. He would hear him mumble, perhaps musing about the events that had so altered their family.
History often portrays Simeon’s father, Moses Wright, as a poor black sharecropper. That is true, from one narrow perspective. But Wright worked land owned by a German immigrant, who allowed him a nice profit every year. Then, at an age when most people retire, Moses Wright had to restart his life in Chicago. He found work cleaning up a bar after 3 a.m., when the drinkers left.
Emmett’s death also sparked a family split.
The infighting and old bitterness played out this year, when some family members fought to keep the federal government from exhuming Till’s body for an autopsy. Some Till relatives in Chicago couldn’t understand why Moses Wright could not stop the men from taking Emmett in 1955. Some wrongly believed that Wright’s mother had insisted Emmett extend his visit and prevented him from leaving Mississippi. And some thought another Wright child, Maurice Wright, had led Emmett’s murderers to the location of the family home.
Maurice drove the car, a ’46 Ford that had to be started in second gear, the day the cousins went to the store where Emmett whistled. He died in 1991. Simeon learned of his brother’s death when a San Francisco hospital called him, wanting to know if Maurice’s body parts could be used for research. He claimed the body, and buried his brother in the same cemetery near Chicago where Emmett Till and Moses Wright lay.
Maurice had died a homeless drunk, estranged from the family. Simeon thinks his brother was never able to reconcile guilt others put on him for Emmett’s death.
I’ve focused mostly on the Till relatives. But I’m sure there are other stories, equally as compelling. The same can be said of any murder. The two men who later bragged about killing Emmett had sons at the time of the trial. Those sons are men now. The prosecutor who tried the case had a young son as well. That son grew up without his father, who died not long after the trial concluded.
In fact, Emmett’s death may still be claiming lives — both black and white.
These are the most basic images of Emmett Till: a famous whistle, a brutal beating, black man versus white man and a much-photographed funeral.
The story seems fairly simple.
But if the reporting is cast wide enough, nothing ever is.
