A Hate Crime and a Courageous Love

Film review

By: Neely Tucker

Date: October 14, 2005

Source: Neely Tucker. "A Hate Crime and a Courageous Love: 'Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till' Offers Powerful Images, but Few New Details." Washington Post (October 14, 2005): C05.

About the Author: Neely Tucker is a staff writer for the Washington Post, a position he has held since 2000. Prior to joining the staff at the Washington Post, Tucker was a foreign correspondent for the Detroit Free Press.

INTRODUCTION

Emmett Louis Till was fourteen years old when he left his home in Chicago for a vacation visit with relatives who were cotton sharecroppers in Mississippi. The young man was described by his friends and relatives as bright, cocky, funny, and confident. Although he lived in a segregated area of Chicago, his experience with racism was limited, and he had never experienced anything akin to the strong racial divide that existed in the rural south in the 1950s. His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, was born in Mississippi. She was wary of allowing her son to travel to the area and warned him of potential dangers, admonishing him to steer clear of white people.

Till and his cousins spent their mornings picking cotton, and the rest of their time enjoying one another's company. It was not uncommon for the group of African-American (then referred to as Negro) youngsters to go to a local store owned by Carolyn and Roy Bryant, play checkers at the outside tables, and purchase some small treats in the evenings. The store, operated by the Bryants, catered to the local sharecroppers, nearly all of whom were African-American.

On August 24, 1955, Emmett Louis Till was one of a dozen or so adolescents who went to Bryant's Grocery and Meat Market in Money, Mississippi. Till had been boasting to his peers of his alleged relationships with white girls; they dared him to flirt with the Caucasian woman running the store (21-year-old Carolyn Bryant). According to published reports of the ensuing events, Till went into the store, made some flirtatious remarks to Ms. Bryant, and then wolf-whistled at her. At that point, the other youngsters reported becoming fearful of the consequences of such forward behavior, and pulling Till back out to the truck in which they had arrived. Three nights later, Bryant's husband Roy, who had just returned from out-of-town business, and his brother-in-law J.W. Milam, kidnapped Emmett Louis Till. He was pistol-whipped, beaten severely, stripped naked, cut with an axe, had one of his eyes gouged out, shot through the head, fastened to a large cotton gin fan, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River. A few days later, his body was found, significantly disfigured and decomposed. He was identified based on a signet ring that he had been known to be wearing.

His mother, Mamie Till Mobley, insisted that his body be shipped back to Chicago. She pried open his casket and had his body publicly displayed, so that as many people as possible could see what the consequences of racial hatred were to her only child. Jet magazine published photographs of the mangled corpse. Although it was widely believed that considerably more than two people were involved in the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Emmett Till, only Bryant and Milam were arrested and charged in the crime. Their trial was held in the middle of September and lasted for only four days. The jury was composed of twelve Caucasian males. Deliberations took slightly more than an hour, and both men were acquitted of the crime. Several months later, both men granted a (paid) interview with Look magazine, in which they confessed to the crime. Because of the double jeopardy law, they could not be tried again for the crimes of kidnapping and murder. The nation was rocked by the brutality of the slaying, as well as the acquittal of the (later confessed) murderers. The death of Emmett Louis Till served to catalyze the early Civil Rights Movement in the United States. For more than half a century, it has stood as a centerpiece of the fight against racism.

PRIMARY SOURCE

In "The Untold Story of Emmett Louis Till," the latest documentary film about the notorious lynching in Mississippi half a century ago, we see how a grieving mother created a landmark moment in American history.

The sheriff in the Delta county where Till was murdered in August 1955 ordered the boy's mutilated corpse to be buried almost immediately after it was dredged from the Tallahatchie River, relatives recount in this fast-paced retelling. The funeral had taken place and they were about to bury the body when the call came from Chicago—Mamie Till Mobley, the 14-year-old's mother, was having none of it.

She ordered the pine box containing her son to be sent home. She then had it pried open and displayed what was inside to all and sundry.

It was a genuinely shocking moment—the disfigured face, an eye out of the socket, the facial skin almost detached from the bone. He had been shot through the head. Then he had been tied by the neck with barbed wire to a 70-pound fan and dumped in the river.

This, for supposedly whistling at a woman at a country store in a two-bit town called Money.

The decision to display that rotting corpse was an act of grief and courage and outrage and, in the end, sheer brilliance. Till's mutilated face exposed Mississippi racism for what it was—a sadistic mixture of bloodlust, sexual hysteria and a level of violence worthy of a psychopath. Till's murder became myth and history personified. All the age-old word-of-mouth horror stories of what white Southern men would do to black men who dared approach white women were put on display in a Chicago church, and, famously, in photographs in Jet magazine.

The outrage Mobley created with that open-casket funeral set the stage for the most racially charged trial in the Deep South since the Scottsboro Boys. Of course, the two killers, Roy Bryant, the offended woman's husband, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, were acquitted by an all-white jury in nothing flat. This raised the nation's fear and loathing of the white South, and the moral impetus for the civil rights movement was crystallized.

This is a familiar story, told in other documentaries, books and lengthy magazine stories, most notably in a Look magazine story in which the accused acknowledged their guilt after being acquitted, and thus were protected from double jeopardy. Director Kevin Beauchamp therefore faces a heavy burden in telling us what's new, or, as the title has it, "untold."

He sets out the story in straight chronological order, with current interviews with Till's now-elderly friends and family to recount the days before and after the killing. There is no narration, only placards to move us along to each chapter.

The best moments, by far, are the black-and-white archival footage. There is the all-white courtroom, people fanning themselves, the unusual close-ups of faces, Mobley's remarkable composure at the time. We see Medgar Evers there, eight years before his assassination. When Bryant gives his wife a long, open-mouth kiss on camera just after acquittal—they look like they're at the twin bill at the drive-in—it makes the flesh crawl.

The archival interviews with Moses Wright, the dead boy's grandfather, belong in a museum.

Old even then, unadorned, plain-spoken, country, he gave the trial its most electrifying moment. On the witness stand, he was asked if he saw the killer in the courtroom. He stood and pointed at the men—this iconic image is in the film—and uttered the immortal two-syllable indictment: "Thar he."

That is what is known as poetry, and it is frustrating the documentary doesn't have more of it. For a movie that bills itself as "untold," there's no "gee-whiz" moment of revelation. There are many fine interviews, apparently some of them new, but there is no narration to tell us which ones. There is a predictable soundtrack of tinkling piano and a gospel choir. There is a disjointed series of events at the end of the film, including what appears to be a New York City Council meeting where the killing was discussed, but I wasn't sure why it was included.

Further, there are no significant modern-day interviews with any of the white participants in the trial, the killer's families, or even local political figures discussing the case. (Both killers are now deceased. They were shunned by the white community in Mississippi after their magazine tell-all and did not lead happy lives thereafter. There's no mention of that sort of interesting postscript.) If those people refused to be interviewed, it would have been helpful to know, and a subtle buttressing of the argument that perhaps people still living know more than they are saying.

The Till murder case has been reopened—the film tells us it's because of the film itself, an odd bit of selfreference—but I left the theater not knowing exactly what the new evidence was. Does it tell us that other people might have been involved? Yes, but that's always been known. Are some named here? Well, sort of, but as I understood it, these were black men who may have been coerced into helping subdue Till that night.

The movie rolls to an end, the lights come up, and you leave the theater feeling moved by a mother's courage, sickened by the crime and a little frustrated, wondering if this unquiet moment in our history will ever rest easy.

SIGNIFICANCE

Emmett Louis Till was the victim of lynching, and his death has been classified as a racially motivated hate crime. After the end of the Civil War in the United States, racial tensions were extremely high. Between 1880 and 1940, the criminal practice of lynching was used as a fear-based bias crime against disliked or feared racial, ethnic, or cultural groups. Historically, the largest numbers of lynchings were perpetrated against African-Americans. The majority of the lynchings took place between 1880 and 1920; their prevalence dwindled considerably thereafter. Very few lynchings were recorded after 1968.

The practice of lynching, widely written about by the media (primarily in local and regional newspapers) and in the popular press, involved the murder, either spontaneous or planned, by a group of people (often times a large crowd, or mob), of a member of a socially undesirable group, usually by some combination of hanging or shooting. At times, torture, in the form of cutting, mutilation, dismemberment, or burning, was employed as well. The victim of the lynching is usually accused of a crime. The bodies were generally left in conspicuous public places. Although lynchings occurred throughout the country, significantly more were reported in southern areas than in northern regions.

All categories of lynchings were more likely to take place in rural than in urban areas and far more prevalent among the people of lower socioeconomic status than among the middle or upper classes. Those who participated in lynchings were seldom arrested or prosecuted for their crimes.

As legally defined, hate crimes (also called bias crimes) are based on an underlying assumption that the victim is fundamentally different, and somehow inferior to, the perpetrator. What is legally novel about this definition is that it qualifies or characterizes already existent types of crime and provides particular penalties based on their occurrence. That is, it increases the penalty for certain types of behavior or activity that have already been deemed criminal. It also specifies that the rationale for the criminal act has to do with an underlying belief system; the perpetrator must target the victim based on convictions regarding the race, gender, age, ethnicity, religion, disability status, sexual orientation, sexual minority group membership, or cultural group to which the victim is believed to belong.

The term "hate crime" originated during the 1980s in response to an incident in New York City in which a group of white adolescents who were heard to be shouting racist remarks killed an African-American man who was running from them. The term "bias crime" may be a more accurate descriptor for this type of event, it the crimes typically arise from prejudice or bias against a group or type of individual, and may be motivated more by a belief system than by underlying emotions or feelings of hatred (although the two often occur simultaneously).

The perpetrators of hate crimes are often adjudicated differently than those whose crimes are believed to be of a random nature. Many are given enhanced sentences in which they receive a higher or more stringent penalty for the commission of this type of activity. In large part, this is due to the underlying philosophy in which bias is likened to terrorist or extremist behavior: it targets an entire class or type of person based on a belief system, and therefore it consists of symbolic behavior as much as it does of actual behavior. The perpetrator may view the target group as subhuman and therefore believe that it is acceptable to seriously harm or kill its members. The crime itself is meant to communicate a message to the entire group: when a synagogue is burned down in a bias crime, it is meant to cause symbolic harm to all persons who are Jewish. The same is true of the lynching of an African-American, the murder of a homeless person, or the beating of an openly gay male.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Books

Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, edited by Michael Tonry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Jenness, Valerie, and Kendal Broad. Hate Crimes: New Social Movements and the Politics of Violence. New York: Aldine De Gruyter, 1997.

Nelson, Marilyn, and Philippe Lardy. A Wreath for Emmett Till. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005.

Herbert Shapiro. White Violence and Black Response: From Reconstruction to Montgomery. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.

Thompson, Julius E. The Black Press in Mississippi. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1993.

Till-Mobley, Mamie, and Christopher Benson. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America. New York: Random House, 2003.

Wakefield, Dan. Revolt in the South. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

Web sites

The American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till. "Killers' Confession: The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi." 〈http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_confession.html〉 (accessed March 10, 2006).

Southern Poverty Law Center. "Intelligence Report: Recognizing and Responding to Hate Crimes." 〈http://www.splcenter.org/intel/law.jsp〉 (accessed March 10, 2006).

Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. "The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880–1950." 〈http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html#b〉 (accessed March 10, 2006).