Getting Away with Murder
Page 9
Mamie Till Bradley continued to travel the country giving lectures about her son and the civil rights movement and advocating for racial equality and harmony. In 1956, she enrolled in Chicago Teachers College to complete her teaching degree; four years later she began a long, satisfying career as an elementary school teacher in Chicago. But Mrs. Bradley would never be able to return to the kind of life she had enjoyed before her son’s death. Her life and the lives of millions of Americans were permanently changed on a hot August night in 1955. The murder of Emmett Till taught America about the urgent need for equal rights for all citizens, regardless of race, but Emmett’s mother learned perhaps the most painful and longest-lasting lesson of all. In a newspaper interview a month after the conclusion of the trial in Sumner, she told reporters, “Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South, I said, ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all.”
Emmett Till’s mother stands in front of a portrait of her son on the fortieth anniversary of his murder in 1995
It still is the business of us all.
TIME LINE
U.S. CIVIL RIGHTS EVENTS,
INCLUDING THE DETAILS OF THE EMMETT TILL CASE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bergman, Peter M., et al. The Chronological History of the Negro in America. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
Brady, Tom P. Black Monday. Winona, Mississippi: Association of Citizens’ Councils, 1955.
Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks. New York: Viking/Penguin Putnam, 2000.
Carson, Clayborne, et al, eds. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader. New York: Penguin, 1991.
David Halberstam’s The Fifties. “Episode 6: The Rage Within.” Dir. Alex Gibney and Tracy Dahlby. Videocassette. The History Channel, 1997.
Davis, Townsend. Weary Feet, Rested Souls: A Guided History of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1998.
“Death in Mississippi.” The Commonweal, 62 (September 23, 1955): 603-604.
Durham, Michael S. Powerful Days: The Civil Rights Photography of Charles Moore. New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1991.
Ebony Pictorial History of Black America, vols. 2 and 3. Nashville: The Southwestern Company, 1971.
Evers-Williams, Myrlie with Williams Peters. For Us, the Living. Jackson, Mississippi: Banner Books, 1967, 1996.
Eyes on the Prize: “Awakenings (1954-56).” Dir. Henry Hampton. Videocassette. Blackside, 1987.
Faulkner, William. Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters. New York: Random House, 1965.
Friedman, Leon, ed. The Civil Rights Reader: Basic Documents of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Walker and Company, 1967.
Goldsby, Jacqueline. “The High and Low Tech of It: The Meaning of Lynching and the Death of Emmett Till.” The Yale Journal of Criticism (9.2) 1966: 245-282.
Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Villard, 1993.
Hampton, Henry, et al, eds. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through the 1980s. New York: Bantam, 1990.
Hendrickson, Paul. “Mississippi Haunting.” The Washington Post. February 27, 2000 (Proquest).
Horton, James Oliver and Lois E. Horton, eds. A History of the African American People. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997.
Hudson-Weems, Clenora. Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement. Troy, Michigan: Bedford Publishers, 1994.
Huie, William Bradford. “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” Look. January 24, 1956: 46-50.
—. “What’s Happened to the Emmett Till Killers?” Look 21 (January 22, 1957): 63-66, 68.
—. Wolf Whistle and Other Stories. New York: Signet, 1959.
Hurley, F. Jack, et al. Pictures Tell the Story: Ernest C. Withers Reflections in History. Norfolk, Virginia: Chrysler Museum of Art, 2000.
“In Memoriam, Emmett Till.” Life. (39) October 10, 1955: 48.
Kasher, Steven. The Civil Rights Movement: Photographic History, 1954-1968. New York: Abbeville Press, 1996.
Kosof, Anna. The Civil Rights Movement and Its Legacy. New York: Franklin Watts, 1989.
Larsson, Clotye Murdock. “Land of the Till Murder Revisited.” Ebony. 41 (March 1986): 53-54, 56-58.
Long, Richard A. Black Americana. Secaucus, NJ: Chartwell Books, 1986.
Lyon, Danny. Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992.
“M is for Mississippi and Murder.” New York, New York: NAACP, 1955.
Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Dial, 1968.
Muse, Benjamin. Ten Years of Prelude: The Story of Integration Since the Supreme Court’s 1954 Decision. New York: Viking, 1964.
Myers, Walter Dean. One More River to Cross: An African American Photograph Album. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
“Nation Horrified by Murder of Kidnaped Chicago Youth.” Jet, 8 (September 15, 1955): 6-9.
Peavy, Charles D. Go Slow Now: Faulkner and the Race Question. Eugene, Oregon: University of Oregon Books, 1971.
Powledge, Fred. We Shall Overcome: Heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993.
“Race: The Great American Divide. Panel 1: We Shall Overcome: Recalling the Civil Rights Struggles of the ‘50s and ’60s.” Brookings National Issues Forum, January 11, 2000. http://www.brook.edu/comm/transcripts/20000111/panell.htm, October 10, 2001.
Robinson, Armstead L. and Patricia Sullivan, eds. New Directions in Civil Rights Studies. Charlottesville, VA: UP of Virginia, 1991.
Robinson, Plater. “The Murder of Emmett Till.” http://www.soundprint.org/documentaries/more_info/emmett_till.phtml
Shakoor, Jordana Y. Civil Rights Childhood. Jackson, Mississippi: UP of Mississippi, 1999.
Terkel, Studs. Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel about the American Obsession. New York: The New Press, 1992.
Thompson, Kathleen and Hilary Mac Austin, eds. The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999.
Tolnay, Stewart E. and E. M. Beck. A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995.
Twentieth-Century America: A Primary Source Collection from the Associated Press by the Writers and Photographers of the Associated Press. Danbury, Conn.: Grolier Educational Corp., 1995.
Wakefield, Dan. “Justice in Sumner: Land of the Free.” The Nation, October 1, 1955.
—. Revolt in the South. New York: Grove Press, 1960.
Waldron, Ann. Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1993.
Wesley, John Milton. “The Final Days of Emmett Till: Legacy of a Lynching in Our Little Mississippi Town.” http://www.cunepress.com/cuncpress/booksonline/essays/etg/etg-pages/r-w/wesley.htm#essay.
Wexler, Sanford. The Civil Rights Movement: An Eyewitness History. New York: Facts on File, 1993.
Whitfield, Stephen J. Death in the Delta. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
Whittaker, Hugh Stephen. “A Case Study in Southern Justice: The Emmett Till Case.” Master’s Thesis, Florida State University, 1963.
Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965 New York: Viking, 1987.
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ON THE EMMETT TILL CASE
WEBSITES
“African-American History” http://afroamhistory.about.com/
“African American History Civil Rights Movement” http://www.academicinfo.net/africanamer.html
“African American Odyssey http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/aaohtml/exhibit/aointro.html
“Afro-American Almanac” http://www.toptags.com/aama/
“Civil Rights in Mississippi: A Digital Archive” http://www.lib.usm.edu/~s
pcol/crda/index.html
“Complete Photo Story of Till Murder Case.” http://www.panopt.com/photogra/withers/fulewtill12.html
“Emmett Till Murder Scene.” http://www.bluejeansplace.com/EmmettTillMurderSite.html
“Eyes on the Prize: A Teaching Guide by Plater Robinson.” http://www.tulane.edu/~so-inst/eyes.html
“Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement” http://www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights/
“The History of Jim Crow” http://jimcrowhistory.org/
“The Murder of Emmett Till.” http://soundprint.org/radio/display_show/ID/205/name/The+Murder+of+ Emmett+Till
“National Civil Rights Museum Virtual Tour” http://www.mecca.org/~crights/cyber.html
“Remembering Jim Crow” http://www.americanradioworks.org/features/remembering/
“Teaching Tolerance” (Southern Poverty Law Center) http://www.tolerance.org/tcach/index.jsp
ARTISTIC WORKS BASED ON THE EMMETT TILL MURDER
Blues for Mr. Charlie, a play by James Baldwin, 1964
A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, A Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon, a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, 1960
The Death of Emmett Till, a folk song by Bob Dylan, 1963
Dreaming Emmett, a play by Toni Morrison, 1986
Emmett Till, a poem by James A. Emanuel, 1968
The Guardian, a play by I’m Ready Productions Inc., 2000.
The Last Quatrain of the Ballad of Emmett Till, a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks
Mississippi and the Face of Emmett Till, a play by Mamie Till Mobley and David Barr
Mississippi Trial, 1955, a novel by Chris Crowe, 2002
Playhouse 90: “Noon on Doomsday” 1956 (Rod Serling)
Playhouse 90: “A Town Has Turned to Dust” 1958 (Rod Serling)
Playhouse 90: “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street” 1960 (Rod Serling)
Poem for Emmett Till, a work for solo cello by William Roper, 2001
The State of Mississippi vs. Emmett Till, a play by David Barr, 1999
A Town Has Turned to Dust, Playhouse 90 television script by Rod Serling, 1958
Wolf Whistle, a novel by Leslie Nordan, 1995
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine, a novel by Bebe Moore Campbell, 1992
FOR FURTHER READING
Bolden, Tonya. Tell All the Children Our Story: Memories and Mementoes of Being Young and Black in America. New York: Henry A. Abrams, 2002.
Brinkley, Douglas. Rosa Parks. New York: Viking/Penguin Putnam, 2000.
Chafe, William Henry, et al, eds. Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the Segregated South. New York: The New Press, 2001.
Crowe, Chris. Mississippi Trial, 1955. New York: Phyllis Fogelman Books, 2002.
David Halberstam’s The Fifties. “Episode 6: The Rage Within.” Dir. Alex Gibney and Tracy Dahlby. Videocassette. The History Channel, 1997.
Eyes on the Prize: “Awakenings (1954-56).” Dir. Henry Hampton. Videocassette. Blackside, 1987.
Hudson-Weems, Clenora. Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement. Troy, Michigan: Bedford Publishers, 1994.
Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. New York: Knopf, 1976.
Levine, Ellen, ed. Freedom’s Children: Young Civil Rights Activists Tell Their Own Stories. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1993.
Meltzer, Milton, ed. The Black Americans: A History in their Own Words. New York: Harper, 1984.
Metress, Christopher, ed. The Lynching of Emmett Till: A Documentary Narrative. Charlottesville, Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2002.
Myers, Walter Dean. One More River to Cross: An African American Photograph Album. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1995.
Robinson, Plater. “The Murder of Emmett Till.” http://www.soundprint.org/documentaries/more_info/emmett_till.phtml
Wexler, Sanford. The Civil Rights Movement: An Eyewitness History. New York: Facts on File, 1993.
Whitfield, Stephen J. Death in the Delta. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1988.
Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965. New York: Viking, 1987.
1 This re-creation of actual events is based on statements made by those present and documents related to the case.
2 Byron de la Beckwith was the Mississippi white supremacist who murdered Medgar Evers in 1963. A Mississippi court finally convicted him of the crime in 1994.