Let the World See (2022) s01e01 Episode Script
The Boy From Chicago
1
["Strange Fruit" plays]
Southern trees ♪
Bearing strange fruit ♪
Black bodies swinging
in the Southern breeze ♪
♪
Strange fruit hanging ♪
From the poplar trees ♪
♪
[Dyson] Black bodies swinging.
Black bodies being filled with buckshots.
Black people being tyrannized
by forces of white resistance
and supremacy that should
have long since died.
It wasn't just the act
of the murder itself
that was terrorism
when it comes to lynching.
The terrorism was also
in the fact that they would
leave those bodies hanging from
trees to warn other Black people
that this is what happens
if you step out of line.
The fact is, about 600 Blacks
were lynched in Mississippi
and about 4,000 across the South
between 1880 and 1940.
It was a common way of handling us.
♪
[Mamie] I read somewhere that
more than 200,000 Black people
moved to Chicago between
the 1920s and the 1950s.
For me, both on my mother's side
and father's side of the family,
folks came from the South.
On my mother's side, my grandfather,
his people came from Alabama.
Same thing was true on
my father's side of the family.
Like most Black folks from the South,
moved for opportunity
and for safety and for security.
[Mamie] As I was growing up, it
really seemed like almost everybody from
Mississippi was coming through our house,
the Ellis Island of Chicago.
Actually, it was more like a terminal
on the Underground Railroad.
[Gordon] Emmett's grandmother,
Alma Spearman,
was instrumental in moving
many of our family members
from the South to the Chicago area.
[Wheeler] And then Alma got us
to come north.
My mother got on the train with five kids.
Boxes of food, and the oldest one being 7.
We were afraid of the train
'cause we didn't see trains
that much and this big, colossal train
sitting up there
we getting ready to get on,
and the smoke was coming out of it,
and then it'd make that noise
Ch-ch-ch-ch.
So we were afraid of it,
but we got on the train
and we came and settled
in the place called Summit,
in Argo, Illinois.
[Gordon] Argo starch plant was
the backbone of the community.
You knew that you could come in
and you could get a job
even if you didn't have a lot of skills
and you could make an honest living.
[Thelma] I was 8 years old
when I moved to Chicago.
My father's name was Moses Wright,
but they called him "Mose".
My father and mother valued education,
and they thought that I was
gonna be sharp and smart.
So they asked my aunt
if I could live with her and go to school,
Emmett's grandmother.
And she said, "Send Thelma."
When I went to Aunt Alma,
Mamie was in her last year of high school.
[choir vocalizing]
♪
[Mamie] Mama had helped to found
the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ
and where she recruited new church members
with practically each
new Mississippi migrant.
♪
She took her strength from her
faith, but also from her folks.
She seemed to pull on a deep awareness
from one fundamental truth
above all else, you must always
keep your family close.
Well, my family was like most
Black families during that time.
We all lived around each other.
My mother's side of the family,
we lived with one of
my great aunts, my grandfather's sister.
So we lived on one block,
and around the corner
lived my maternal grandmother
along with another sister.
And around the corner from them
lived my maternal grandfather.
And I always thought
that my paternal grandparents
lived far from us,
but they literally lived
10 blocks away from us.
There was a freedom and an openness
and just sort of a sense of community
that we all tried to replicate in Chicago.
But you understood
when you were in the South
that that's where it all came from.
[Mamie] We came to call it Argo,
Little Mississippi.
For us, it meant the joy of the familiar,
of family and friends,
and, of course, runaway ambition.
But there was that other half,
what people knew they had fled.
[Dyson] Mamie was sheltered.
Her mother was very protective.
She begins to hang out with Louis Till.
Louis Till didn't start out
with a lot of advantages.
He was an orphan.
[Benson] They had their first
date at Burg's Drug Store.
Summit at the time
was racially segregated.
Louis took a stand
literally by standing up
and facing the drug store owner
and saying that they were
gonna stay there,
and he allowed them to stay.
[Mamie] From that day on,
I really admired Louis Till,
looked up to him.
She was 18.
So they made their plans,
and they got married.
♪
[Mamie] I will always remember the day
Emmett was born.
It was July 25, 1941, a Friday.
[Thelma] But I was there when he was born.
I was at the Antioch Baptist Church,
at a little piano recital
and my Aunt Alma whispered,
said, "Mamie had a boy."
[Mamie] Bobo that was the playful name
a young family friend had given to my baby
while I was still carrying him.
It stuck.
[Wideman] Louis Till was not
a very good husband,
according to Mamie.
He was abusive even.
In fact, she called the police
and had a restraining order put on him,
and it was that restraining order,
in a way, that got Louis Till in the army.
"You broke this
restraining order, Mr. Till,
and I could send your butt to prison,
or you can go join the army."
And Till chose the army option.
After Louis Till leaves
and joins the army,
Mamie moves back into the home
with her mother,
and Emmett spends his
early years in that household.
[Mamie] My young cousin, Thelma Wright,
was living there at the time.
She was about 10 when Emmett was born,
and she was always there to pitch in.
Oh, I remember Emmett loved bananas.
He was a good baby.
He was like my brother.
I pinned diapers on him,
those old birdseye diapers.
He used to call me
"Thel-moo" for some reason.
[Gordon] When my parents came,
they lived in the apartment
with Emmett's mother and Emmett,
myself and my siblings,
and Emmett was the only child,
so he seemed to have adored
having the fact that there was
other young children around.
Louis Till continued to support
his family,
his newborn son and his wife,
by arranging to have money
sent back from the service.
He was stationed in Italy.
And Mamie continued
to receive money from his pay
while he was in the service.
When that stopped, that's one
thing that alerted Mamie
that something terrible had happened.
♪
[Man] The traditional letter of greetings
that started millions of men on their way
to fighting for democracy in World War II.
[Angie] A lot of people don't
talk about Emmett's father.
His father was a soldier,
overseas in the war.
[Wideman] The policy of the War Department
was to segregate very, very
deeply the armed services.
The military Can you imagine?
A Negro goes over
on a foreign soil and thinks he's free?
You're not in Mississippi anymore.
You're not in Chicago anymore.
You're in Italy, right?
You're in Germany. You're in
foreign theaters of war.
Don't you ever forget who you are.
[Wideman] Mrs. Till, Mamie,
received a telegram.
And the letter was a lie.
It left out the truth of what
had happened to her husband.
It said, "Soldier died outside
of combat by his own fault."
♪
[Wideman] On a June evening in
Civitavecchia, Italy,
there were American forces
occupying that part of Italy.
The only light was because of
a false alarm of an air raid
on the American base near Bonn.
There was the shooting
of an Italian woman,
murder of an Italian woman,
and there was an alleged rape
of two other women.
Well, Till and his friends
had a night off.
They were drinking.
They sat around,
they drank half the night.
And so they became
the number-one suspects,
and they became convicted.
They were convicted.
When it went to trial,
the woman who was making
the accusation was asked,
"Is the person who raped you
in this room?"
And Emmett's father, Louis Till,
was sitting right there, and she said no.
No eyewitnesses,
no one ever identified
Till or his friends in the courtroom
when the victims were sitting there.
Never any identifications.
All kind of circumstantial evidence.
So he was executed just because.
She did not say that he raped
her, but they still killed him.
[Wideman] And this was not unusual.
It was like a lynching or
an execution.
[Mamie] Emmett was nearly 4
when I got the telegram
much too young to absorb any of it.
For him, all that was left
of his father's life
was the ring that had been
returned to me by the army,
the one with the initials "L.T."
What I remember personally is
that nobody ever talked about
Emmett Till Sr.
Nobody talked about it.
That was the weird part
about that whole scenario
back in those days.
Nobody knew him. Nobody asked about him.
It just wasn't spoken of.
Bobo was 4 years my senior.
Although he was our great protector,
he could do whatever,
tease, but nobody else had better do it,
'cause he was very protective of us.
♪
[Wheeler] We lived next door to each
other.
We right there, from day one, we
right there next to each other.
This picture was taken about 1950,
and I was about 11, 12 years old.
Emmett was about 9 or 10.
As long as I can remember,
he stuttered real bad all the time.
Some of the things
-He just couldn't get words out, you know?
-He had polio as a child, as a baby.
And that left him
with that speech impediment.
He spent his money mostly on us,
on myself and my four siblings.
He just had a kind heart that way.
He just wanted people to be happy.
He was a happy child,
and he wanted people
around him to be happy.
Jingle bells, jingle bells ♪
Jingle all the way ♪
[Gordon] The last Christmas,
we had a beautiful Christmas.
1954, I believe it was.
It wasn't like Mississippi
when I was a little girl.
Everything you had was in a shoe box.
[Mamie] We had the pictures taken of Bo
in all of the clothes we had bought him
lying across the bed
and, of course, posed next to me,
our mother and son portrait.
[Gordon] Emmett got that hat,
his signature hat.
That was a gift from his mom.
♪
[Benson] During the summer of 1955,
Moses Wright came to Chicago.
Mose Wright is my grandfather.
He's Emmett Till's great uncle.
During the course of that visit,
Emmett learned
that his best friend,
his cousin, Wheeler Parker,
was going to go back to
Mississippi with Moses Wright,
and he had to go with him.
And he was very aggressive about
trying to go, I understand.
[Dyson] So, Mamie Till-Mobley
had the talk with Emmett.
When a white person speaks to you,
you then speak to them with respect.
Get off the side of the road,
no sudden movements,
no sassing, fall on your knees,
bow down, scrape, apologize,
beg for forgiveness
should anything like that occur.
Mamie had to try to warn
Emmett against that,
but at the same time,
"But have fun, baby."
[chuckles]
It's a tough, tough assignment.
[Obama] That was the dilemma
and continued to be the dilemma
of the Black mother, of the Black family,
of just trying to find a place
where your kids can grow up safe
and healthy and whole.
That is a struggle,
a conversation that every mother has.
But the realness of it was understood
because those were the conversations
we'd have to have in our household,
as a Black person out there,
when you step outside of your community,
that you may not be safe.
And that was the truth for so many people.
I remember conversations
my mother would have
with my brother as he was getting older
and starting to drive and venture out.
That was the air we breathed.
[train whistle blows, bell dinging]
[Wheeler] We met up,
and he got on the train,
and we traveled together to Mississippi.
1955, Emmett Till is heading
in August to Money, Mississippi.
1955, what happened?
1954 Brown versus Board of Education.
My God, the Supreme Court decision.
[Angie] Brown versus Board of Education
was the court case that led
to schools being desegregated,
which means that the Black kids
and the white kids
could go to school together.
White politicians are looking
for votes of fearful white people.
Yeah, because the underlying
fear was not just, you know,
"Oh, we don't want our kids
going to school with Black kids."
It was, "What's gonna happen
once our kids do go to school
with the Black kids?
Are our daughters
gonna date the Black boys?
Are they gonna bring home
the little brown babies?"
[Dyson] A couple of weeks before
Emmett Till arrives
in Mississippi, an activist, Lamar Smith,
is shot in broad daylight,
10:00 a.m. in the morning,
because he's trying to register
Black people to vote.
This is the Mississippi
into which Emmett Till came
in 1955, in that summer.
There's already tension.
There's already fear.
There's fear of someone like him
before he ever steps foot in this state,
before he ever steps off that train.
♪
[train whistle blows]
♪
[Dyson] 1955, the hot summer
in Mississippi.
Mississippi, a state, as Dr. King said,
"Sweltering with the heat
of injustice and depression."
This is where Mamie Till
was sending her son.
But it's home.
Mississippi is not merely made
by white supremacy.
It's made by Black love, Black ingenuity,
the blues, jazz, gospel.
That's Mississippi, too.
♪
♪
[Wheeler] In Money,
the town was very small,
and we lived about three miles
from the town,
down on the gravel road.
The houses were spreaded apart,
and being in the country,
it's so quiet.
Life was very, very simple. Very simple.
And you had so much fun
among yourselves, you know?
Across the street from my house,
there was like a river,
and we'd go swimming.
We had a contest. You had
to go down and touch the bottom.
See who can touch the bottom.
Okay, how you know if you touch
the bottom or not?
You got to bring some mud back up.
So we go down, we bring the mud,
and the deeper you went,
the colder the water got.
We had a lot of fun with nothing.
♪
[Benson] While Emmett's in
Mississippi, he does write home.
He sends a letter to his mom,
and he sends a letter
to his grandmother, Alma.
He talks about what
a wonderful time he's having.
So it's, you know, the kind of letter
that you would expect to get
from your son on vacation.
♪
[Wheeler] We were there at the beginning
of cotton picking time.
We got there on a Sunday.
And we're picking cotton there
Monday, Tuesday.
This Wednesday, we picked cotton.
We went to Money after we picked cotton
Emmett Till, Uncle Simmy,
Maurice, and a girl named Ruth.
And we got there, and the kids
had gathered around
playing checkers and talking
outside the store there,
Bryant's store.
[Dyson] The Bryants' store
was a staple in the community.
Mr. Bryant and Mrs. Bryant
owning that store
were well-known in that community.
They would tolerate
Black people coming in,
but they have to respect
and acknowledge the rules
and the conventions of white
supremacy, of segregation,
of Jim Crow, and of the store.
And if you do that, we're all
gonna get along just fine.
[Angie] Emmett is walking into somewhere,
not realizing
that he's walking into a place
that's already bubbling and boiling over,
where he's seen as a threat
before he ever even opens his mouth.
[Dyson] Carolyn Bryant was
no doubt raised in a culture
where she was seeing
Black men as a threat.
This is a thought that goes back
to slavery.
There was fear that Black men would
how should I say this
procreate with white women.
And this fear is still present today.
He just said, "We're going wilding.
We're gonna go raise hell."
[Man on Street] I also wanted to take them
after they get out of jail
and put them in the gorilla cage
in the Park Zoo.
[Angie] Black men are seen
as these sexual beings,
like sexual gorillas.
This fear of Black men, in that sense,
has existed since the birth of America.
So, yeah, it's not hard
to imagine that Carolyn Bryant
felt that she was somehow under attack,
that even a slight gesture
would appear to be
something way out of order.
When I go in the store, right away
you're in Mississippi and the
store is ran by white people.
Got to bring out your Southern training.
"Yes, sir," and "no, ma'am." Be careful.
It's a way of life. You learn this.
I didn't have to be thinking.
I didn't have to rehearse it.
-I know where I'm at.
-[bell jingles]
So Emmett comes in,
Bobo comes in the store.
It just hit me all at once.
I said, "Man, I hope he got it right."
I didn't know if his mother,
if she had taught him
what to say and how to do
and how to behave.
I left him in there.
Nothing happened while we was in there.
And Simmy went in. Nothing happened.
Got what they want, came out.
They came out, and some time later,
I don't know how long it was,
Ms. Bryant came out.
She came out, and Emmett
loved to make people laugh.
He gives this wolf-whistle.
I mean, we all could have fainted.
In Mississippi in 1955?
And you give a wolf-whistle?
What is wrong with you?
People will kill for a reckless eyeball.
He have no idea where he's at,
no idea what he has done.
And no one said, "Let's go."
We just made a beeline for the car.
Now he's afraid
because he sees our reaction.
Man, we shot out of there,
going down this gravel road,
dust is flying,
and there's a car behind us.
And the car come out of nowhere.
I mean, we out in the country.
Where'd this car come from?
Said, "Man, they after us."
We left the car, and we ran
through the cotton field,
and I remember Bobo falling,
and we ran over,
and the cotton balls,
they beating your legs.
And of course, the car went
on by, and then we regrouped
at the edge of the road.
Ruth, she said,
"Look, I know those people."
Said, "Y'all are gonna hear
some more from this.
This is not over."
And Emmett, he asked to stop
to tell my grandfather.
Of course, we didn't tell my grandfather.
Thursday passed, and Friday,
then we forgot all about it.
And Sunday morning,
that's when it all jumped off.
♪
♪
Sunday morning, about 2:30
in the morning, I woke up.
I heard them talking,
and they talking about
what happened at the store.
It's dark as a thousand midnights.
And you could hear them coming.
They said, "You got two boys
here from Chicago,"
and I said, "Oh, my God.
I'm getting ready "
I said, "These people
getting ready to kill us."
I said, "We're getting ready to die."
[train whistle blows]
♪
♪
[Moses] Sunday morning about 2:30,
I heard a voice at the door.
And I asked, who was it?
And they said, "This is Mr. Bryant.
I want to talk with you and the boy."
And when I open the door,
there was a man standing
with a pistol in one hand and
a flashlight in the other one.
[Wheeler] And they entered
my room with a flashlight.
Saw the flashlight shines, and I could see
the big bald-headed guy with the pistol.
And I'm waiting to be shot,
and I close my eyes.
And I wasn't shot.
I opened my eyes,
and they're passing by me
because they were looking for fat boy,
the fat boy from Chicago.
[Thelma] They went to the next room
and found Simeon and Emmett,
and they told him to get up.
And he got up, and he was
putting on his shoes,
and they said, "Hurry up."
And he said, "I'm not used
to putting on my shoes
without my socks."
[Wheeler] Bryant was not the leader.
His half-brother,
J.W. Milam, is in control.
He was running it, taking care
of his little brother,
and showing him how
he's supposed to be expert
in handling people that got out of line.
He said he did it in the military.
My grandfather tried
to tell them, "Don't take him.
The boy didn't have good sense,"
or something of that nature,
and my grandmother offered them money.
And they marched him to the car,
and he drove toward Money.
♪
[thunder rumbles]
[Wheeler] And that's
the last time we saw him.
[Marvel] He said, "I think about
the look in Emmett's eye
when they took him out of that house
and nobody said a word."
He said, "I wonder what he was thinking."
And that's a burden that he carries.
At times, I've wondered, "Why
didn't they put up a fight?"
But they couldn't.
What could they have done?
I think about the young woman
who recorded George Floyd's death.
[Floyd] I can't breathe, Officer.
Get off of his neck!
[Woman] You don't have to
kneel on him! He's dying!
[Angie] And the death threats she's gotten
just from standing there with a phone.
So when I think of Emmett and
his family, it's the same thing.
In that moment, if they had not complied,
they could have all been killed.
[Wheeler] I stayed
right there in that room.
Only person that was awake
beside me was Simeon.
He never left his room.
No one said anything after.
It was just quiet
as a church mouse, so to speak.
♪
[telephone ringing]
[Benson] Early on Sunday morning,
Mamie's awakened by the call
from Willie Mae, a cousin.
The call that no mother ever wants to get.
Emmett has been taken
in the middle of the night
by two white men.
She goes into a panic and begins
to process what can be done.
She knows what that means,
when white men come for you
at 2:00 in the morning in Mississippi.
It's not good.
[Thelma] I was in church
when they stopped the service
and told us that two white men
had taken Bo.
And I cried.
I cried, and I cried.
I couldn't stop crying.
This is a transformative moment for Mamie.
She has to take charge,
and she rises to the occasion.
♪
[Michaeli] Mamie Till-Mobley
contacts The Defender
and the Chicago Tribune right away
and gets the Chicago media
involved in a way
-that will make this a national issue.
-She also was able to make contact
with the nephew of her
stepfather, Rayfield Mooty,
who was a union official
with Inland Steel,
the steelworkers union,
and was well-connected
in the Chicago community.
He began to outline the things
that they needed to do.
They needed to call on elected officials
in order to make a difference
in the search for Emmett
down in Mississippi.
Unlike today, politics was a
thing everybody was engaged in.
Chicago was a political animal.
It was a force.
Your alderman represented
your neighborhood
that represented you in the City Council.
So you knew who your alderman was.
And that was one of my first
direct experiences with politics
because my father was a precinct captain,
and that meant that he worked
in a ward for an alderman.
[Michaeli] And so Mamie would
have grown up in a community
where she knew
who the precinct captain was.
[Benson] So the political
officials at the time
also became activated, and even
Mayor Daley got involved.
♪
As the hours ticked on,
there was uncertainty in Chicago
with what was being done down
in Mississippi to find Emmett.
And understanding the
racial politics of Mississippi,
everyone feared the worst.
♪
[insects chirping]
[Wheeler] When they took Emmett,
it was very terrifying.
They told my grandfather they
were gonna bring him back
if he wasn't the one.
So I didn't sleep all night.
Every time a car went by,
"Oh, here they come."
As dark as a thousand midnights
andit seemed like daylight
would never come.
Sitting there in the dark,
I was just terrified
because my imagination, you know,
was running away with me,
and I'm planning my getaway
because I'm in Mississippi
and I got to get out of here.
Once the news got to Chicago, my mother,
some kind of way, got in touch
with my daddy's brother,
Elbert Parker.
And Uncle Elbert takes him to Duck Hill,
to Uncle William's house.
[Wheeler] My Uncle William took
me early to the train station,
and that's when I was able
to get out of there, so
Excuse me, but I always had
a lot of respect for my uncles.
In the South, they were putting
their life on the line
to get involved with something like that.
♪
[train whistle blows]
[Angie] He wasn't the first one,
and he wasn't the last one.
Black people, Black men,
and Black boys especially
were often smuggled out of Mississippi
in the middle of the night
because there was a threat on their life
and they had to get out
as soon as possible,
as quickly as possible.
Yeah, I just couldn't
get home fast enough.
♪
When I got to the train station,
they were there to pick me up,
and they took me straight
to Emmett Till's mother's house.
I felt I don't know if
the word is "guilty" or what,
but when I saw her, I'm here, I survived,
and her son didn't.
It's kind of hard to put into words.
But it had a bearing on me.
By now, from Sunday morning,
her son has been missing.
Over 24 hours, I guess, had passed,
and they knew the South.
They knew the South.
♪
♪
[Reporter] This is the muddy
backwoods Tallahatchie River,
where a weighted body was found.
♪
♪
[Pearson] Three days after
Emmett Till was missing,
his body was found by a young boy
who was fishing in the Tallahatchie River.
[Johnny] Robert Hodges,
the only thing he found
of the child Emmett in the black bayou
was the legs sticking up.
And he notified the sheriff's department,
and they came out and took the body.
[siren wails]
♪
Wednesday, the sheriff came
and told me they had found
a body at Philipp
and wanted me to go and identify
the body, which I did.
And we found the body,
which didn't have on any clothes at all.
His body was so badly damaged
that we couldn't hardly
just tell who he was.
[Pearson] Brutally beaten.
A cotton gin fan tied around his neck
with a piece of barbed wire
in the hopes to hold the body down.
It was a naked body that was
swollen and battered and beaten.
[Moses] But he happened to have
on a ring with his initials,
and that cleared it up.
His father's ring was still on his finger,
and that was the proof that Papa offered
in identifying him as being Emmett.
♪
♪
[telephone rings]
[Angie] Then the call came
Emmett's body had been found.
Aunt Mamie started crying and yelling,
and we didn't know what had happened.
The grief in the house,
the sadness in the house
was horrible.
♪
The screaming.
The disbelief.
[Thelma] Mamie was just devastated.
It was hard to see her heartbroken.
♪
[Gordon] But she had
to pull herself together
'cause she had to get
the mechanisms in place
to bring him back to Chicago.
♪
♪
[Benson] Now, the Tallahatchie
County Sheriff, H.C. Strider,
orders that Emmett's body
be buried immediately,
before the sun sets that day.
The grave is actually being dug
when Mamie gets the information
that they're about to bury
her son in Mississippi.
First of all, why is the sheriff
even making that decision?
When have you heard of a sheriff
deciding that the body should be buried?
There's something really, really
that they're trying to hide here.
For his mom, that was
an immediate red flag.
She set off a domino effect.
Miss Mamie began to call
everybody she knew.
She called the governor.
She called Mayor Daley.
She called everybody she could touch
and finally got them engaged
to bring the child home.
♪
The stopping of the burial
came from Illinois.
Chicago Mayor Daley,
who had just become a mayor,
they stepped up and got that stopped.
♪
[Benson] The same train that
took Emmett down,
the City of New Orleans train,
brought his remains back to Chicago.
♪
♪
The night they brought Emmett's
body back from Mississippi,
everybody went down to the train station.
♪
♪
[Gordon] The body came in, I understand,
in a wooden sealed box.
♪
[Dyson] Her uncle and authorities
had signed an agreement
that the casket would be sealed.
Why would Mississippi
want a sealed casket?
Hmm.
Emmett's mother said,
"Well, give me a crowbar,
give me whatever.
What can they do to me?
They've taken my son."
[Mamie] What could they charge me
with anyway?
Breaking and entering? I didn't care.
The Mississippi officials were the ones
with something to hide.
What on earth was it?
What was I about to witness?
It's powerful, and it's
it was history-changing.
That one little act of
"I'm gonna see my son.
I'm going to see my son's face"
literally changed history as we know it.
Captions by VITAC
[choir vocalizing]
♪
♪
♪
♪
["Strange Fruit" plays]
Southern trees ♪
Bearing strange fruit ♪
Black bodies swinging
in the Southern breeze ♪
♪
Strange fruit hanging ♪
From the poplar trees ♪
♪
[Dyson] Black bodies swinging.
Black bodies being filled with buckshots.
Black people being tyrannized
by forces of white resistance
and supremacy that should
have long since died.
It wasn't just the act
of the murder itself
that was terrorism
when it comes to lynching.
The terrorism was also
in the fact that they would
leave those bodies hanging from
trees to warn other Black people
that this is what happens
if you step out of line.
The fact is, about 600 Blacks
were lynched in Mississippi
and about 4,000 across the South
between 1880 and 1940.
It was a common way of handling us.
♪
[Mamie] I read somewhere that
more than 200,000 Black people
moved to Chicago between
the 1920s and the 1950s.
For me, both on my mother's side
and father's side of the family,
folks came from the South.
On my mother's side, my grandfather,
his people came from Alabama.
Same thing was true on
my father's side of the family.
Like most Black folks from the South,
moved for opportunity
and for safety and for security.
[Mamie] As I was growing up, it
really seemed like almost everybody from
Mississippi was coming through our house,
the Ellis Island of Chicago.
Actually, it was more like a terminal
on the Underground Railroad.
[Gordon] Emmett's grandmother,
Alma Spearman,
was instrumental in moving
many of our family members
from the South to the Chicago area.
[Wheeler] And then Alma got us
to come north.
My mother got on the train with five kids.
Boxes of food, and the oldest one being 7.
We were afraid of the train
'cause we didn't see trains
that much and this big, colossal train
sitting up there
we getting ready to get on,
and the smoke was coming out of it,
and then it'd make that noise
Ch-ch-ch-ch.
So we were afraid of it,
but we got on the train
and we came and settled
in the place called Summit,
in Argo, Illinois.
[Gordon] Argo starch plant was
the backbone of the community.
You knew that you could come in
and you could get a job
even if you didn't have a lot of skills
and you could make an honest living.
[Thelma] I was 8 years old
when I moved to Chicago.
My father's name was Moses Wright,
but they called him "Mose".
My father and mother valued education,
and they thought that I was
gonna be sharp and smart.
So they asked my aunt
if I could live with her and go to school,
Emmett's grandmother.
And she said, "Send Thelma."
When I went to Aunt Alma,
Mamie was in her last year of high school.
[choir vocalizing]
♪
[Mamie] Mama had helped to found
the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ
and where she recruited new church members
with practically each
new Mississippi migrant.
♪
She took her strength from her
faith, but also from her folks.
She seemed to pull on a deep awareness
from one fundamental truth
above all else, you must always
keep your family close.
Well, my family was like most
Black families during that time.
We all lived around each other.
My mother's side of the family,
we lived with one of
my great aunts, my grandfather's sister.
So we lived on one block,
and around the corner
lived my maternal grandmother
along with another sister.
And around the corner from them
lived my maternal grandfather.
And I always thought
that my paternal grandparents
lived far from us,
but they literally lived
10 blocks away from us.
There was a freedom and an openness
and just sort of a sense of community
that we all tried to replicate in Chicago.
But you understood
when you were in the South
that that's where it all came from.
[Mamie] We came to call it Argo,
Little Mississippi.
For us, it meant the joy of the familiar,
of family and friends,
and, of course, runaway ambition.
But there was that other half,
what people knew they had fled.
[Dyson] Mamie was sheltered.
Her mother was very protective.
She begins to hang out with Louis Till.
Louis Till didn't start out
with a lot of advantages.
He was an orphan.
[Benson] They had their first
date at Burg's Drug Store.
Summit at the time
was racially segregated.
Louis took a stand
literally by standing up
and facing the drug store owner
and saying that they were
gonna stay there,
and he allowed them to stay.
[Mamie] From that day on,
I really admired Louis Till,
looked up to him.
She was 18.
So they made their plans,
and they got married.
♪
[Mamie] I will always remember the day
Emmett was born.
It was July 25, 1941, a Friday.
[Thelma] But I was there when he was born.
I was at the Antioch Baptist Church,
at a little piano recital
and my Aunt Alma whispered,
said, "Mamie had a boy."
[Mamie] Bobo that was the playful name
a young family friend had given to my baby
while I was still carrying him.
It stuck.
[Wideman] Louis Till was not
a very good husband,
according to Mamie.
He was abusive even.
In fact, she called the police
and had a restraining order put on him,
and it was that restraining order,
in a way, that got Louis Till in the army.
"You broke this
restraining order, Mr. Till,
and I could send your butt to prison,
or you can go join the army."
And Till chose the army option.
After Louis Till leaves
and joins the army,
Mamie moves back into the home
with her mother,
and Emmett spends his
early years in that household.
[Mamie] My young cousin, Thelma Wright,
was living there at the time.
She was about 10 when Emmett was born,
and she was always there to pitch in.
Oh, I remember Emmett loved bananas.
He was a good baby.
He was like my brother.
I pinned diapers on him,
those old birdseye diapers.
He used to call me
"Thel-moo" for some reason.
[Gordon] When my parents came,
they lived in the apartment
with Emmett's mother and Emmett,
myself and my siblings,
and Emmett was the only child,
so he seemed to have adored
having the fact that there was
other young children around.
Louis Till continued to support
his family,
his newborn son and his wife,
by arranging to have money
sent back from the service.
He was stationed in Italy.
And Mamie continued
to receive money from his pay
while he was in the service.
When that stopped, that's one
thing that alerted Mamie
that something terrible had happened.
♪
[Man] The traditional letter of greetings
that started millions of men on their way
to fighting for democracy in World War II.
[Angie] A lot of people don't
talk about Emmett's father.
His father was a soldier,
overseas in the war.
[Wideman] The policy of the War Department
was to segregate very, very
deeply the armed services.
The military Can you imagine?
A Negro goes over
on a foreign soil and thinks he's free?
You're not in Mississippi anymore.
You're not in Chicago anymore.
You're in Italy, right?
You're in Germany. You're in
foreign theaters of war.
Don't you ever forget who you are.
[Wideman] Mrs. Till, Mamie,
received a telegram.
And the letter was a lie.
It left out the truth of what
had happened to her husband.
It said, "Soldier died outside
of combat by his own fault."
♪
[Wideman] On a June evening in
Civitavecchia, Italy,
there were American forces
occupying that part of Italy.
The only light was because of
a false alarm of an air raid
on the American base near Bonn.
There was the shooting
of an Italian woman,
murder of an Italian woman,
and there was an alleged rape
of two other women.
Well, Till and his friends
had a night off.
They were drinking.
They sat around,
they drank half the night.
And so they became
the number-one suspects,
and they became convicted.
They were convicted.
When it went to trial,
the woman who was making
the accusation was asked,
"Is the person who raped you
in this room?"
And Emmett's father, Louis Till,
was sitting right there, and she said no.
No eyewitnesses,
no one ever identified
Till or his friends in the courtroom
when the victims were sitting there.
Never any identifications.
All kind of circumstantial evidence.
So he was executed just because.
She did not say that he raped
her, but they still killed him.
[Wideman] And this was not unusual.
It was like a lynching or
an execution.
[Mamie] Emmett was nearly 4
when I got the telegram
much too young to absorb any of it.
For him, all that was left
of his father's life
was the ring that had been
returned to me by the army,
the one with the initials "L.T."
What I remember personally is
that nobody ever talked about
Emmett Till Sr.
Nobody talked about it.
That was the weird part
about that whole scenario
back in those days.
Nobody knew him. Nobody asked about him.
It just wasn't spoken of.
Bobo was 4 years my senior.
Although he was our great protector,
he could do whatever,
tease, but nobody else had better do it,
'cause he was very protective of us.
♪
[Wheeler] We lived next door to each
other.
We right there, from day one, we
right there next to each other.
This picture was taken about 1950,
and I was about 11, 12 years old.
Emmett was about 9 or 10.
As long as I can remember,
he stuttered real bad all the time.
Some of the things
-He just couldn't get words out, you know?
-He had polio as a child, as a baby.
And that left him
with that speech impediment.
He spent his money mostly on us,
on myself and my four siblings.
He just had a kind heart that way.
He just wanted people to be happy.
He was a happy child,
and he wanted people
around him to be happy.
Jingle bells, jingle bells ♪
Jingle all the way ♪
[Gordon] The last Christmas,
we had a beautiful Christmas.
1954, I believe it was.
It wasn't like Mississippi
when I was a little girl.
Everything you had was in a shoe box.
[Mamie] We had the pictures taken of Bo
in all of the clothes we had bought him
lying across the bed
and, of course, posed next to me,
our mother and son portrait.
[Gordon] Emmett got that hat,
his signature hat.
That was a gift from his mom.
♪
[Benson] During the summer of 1955,
Moses Wright came to Chicago.
Mose Wright is my grandfather.
He's Emmett Till's great uncle.
During the course of that visit,
Emmett learned
that his best friend,
his cousin, Wheeler Parker,
was going to go back to
Mississippi with Moses Wright,
and he had to go with him.
And he was very aggressive about
trying to go, I understand.
[Dyson] So, Mamie Till-Mobley
had the talk with Emmett.
When a white person speaks to you,
you then speak to them with respect.
Get off the side of the road,
no sudden movements,
no sassing, fall on your knees,
bow down, scrape, apologize,
beg for forgiveness
should anything like that occur.
Mamie had to try to warn
Emmett against that,
but at the same time,
"But have fun, baby."
[chuckles]
It's a tough, tough assignment.
[Obama] That was the dilemma
and continued to be the dilemma
of the Black mother, of the Black family,
of just trying to find a place
where your kids can grow up safe
and healthy and whole.
That is a struggle,
a conversation that every mother has.
But the realness of it was understood
because those were the conversations
we'd have to have in our household,
as a Black person out there,
when you step outside of your community,
that you may not be safe.
And that was the truth for so many people.
I remember conversations
my mother would have
with my brother as he was getting older
and starting to drive and venture out.
That was the air we breathed.
[train whistle blows, bell dinging]
[Wheeler] We met up,
and he got on the train,
and we traveled together to Mississippi.
1955, Emmett Till is heading
in August to Money, Mississippi.
1955, what happened?
1954 Brown versus Board of Education.
My God, the Supreme Court decision.
[Angie] Brown versus Board of Education
was the court case that led
to schools being desegregated,
which means that the Black kids
and the white kids
could go to school together.
White politicians are looking
for votes of fearful white people.
Yeah, because the underlying
fear was not just, you know,
"Oh, we don't want our kids
going to school with Black kids."
It was, "What's gonna happen
once our kids do go to school
with the Black kids?
Are our daughters
gonna date the Black boys?
Are they gonna bring home
the little brown babies?"
[Dyson] A couple of weeks before
Emmett Till arrives
in Mississippi, an activist, Lamar Smith,
is shot in broad daylight,
10:00 a.m. in the morning,
because he's trying to register
Black people to vote.
This is the Mississippi
into which Emmett Till came
in 1955, in that summer.
There's already tension.
There's already fear.
There's fear of someone like him
before he ever steps foot in this state,
before he ever steps off that train.
♪
[train whistle blows]
♪
[Dyson] 1955, the hot summer
in Mississippi.
Mississippi, a state, as Dr. King said,
"Sweltering with the heat
of injustice and depression."
This is where Mamie Till
was sending her son.
But it's home.
Mississippi is not merely made
by white supremacy.
It's made by Black love, Black ingenuity,
the blues, jazz, gospel.
That's Mississippi, too.
♪
♪
[Wheeler] In Money,
the town was very small,
and we lived about three miles
from the town,
down on the gravel road.
The houses were spreaded apart,
and being in the country,
it's so quiet.
Life was very, very simple. Very simple.
And you had so much fun
among yourselves, you know?
Across the street from my house,
there was like a river,
and we'd go swimming.
We had a contest. You had
to go down and touch the bottom.
See who can touch the bottom.
Okay, how you know if you touch
the bottom or not?
You got to bring some mud back up.
So we go down, we bring the mud,
and the deeper you went,
the colder the water got.
We had a lot of fun with nothing.
♪
[Benson] While Emmett's in
Mississippi, he does write home.
He sends a letter to his mom,
and he sends a letter
to his grandmother, Alma.
He talks about what
a wonderful time he's having.
So it's, you know, the kind of letter
that you would expect to get
from your son on vacation.
♪
[Wheeler] We were there at the beginning
of cotton picking time.
We got there on a Sunday.
And we're picking cotton there
Monday, Tuesday.
This Wednesday, we picked cotton.
We went to Money after we picked cotton
Emmett Till, Uncle Simmy,
Maurice, and a girl named Ruth.
And we got there, and the kids
had gathered around
playing checkers and talking
outside the store there,
Bryant's store.
[Dyson] The Bryants' store
was a staple in the community.
Mr. Bryant and Mrs. Bryant
owning that store
were well-known in that community.
They would tolerate
Black people coming in,
but they have to respect
and acknowledge the rules
and the conventions of white
supremacy, of segregation,
of Jim Crow, and of the store.
And if you do that, we're all
gonna get along just fine.
[Angie] Emmett is walking into somewhere,
not realizing
that he's walking into a place
that's already bubbling and boiling over,
where he's seen as a threat
before he ever even opens his mouth.
[Dyson] Carolyn Bryant was
no doubt raised in a culture
where she was seeing
Black men as a threat.
This is a thought that goes back
to slavery.
There was fear that Black men would
how should I say this
procreate with white women.
And this fear is still present today.
He just said, "We're going wilding.
We're gonna go raise hell."
[Man on Street] I also wanted to take them
after they get out of jail
and put them in the gorilla cage
in the Park Zoo.
[Angie] Black men are seen
as these sexual beings,
like sexual gorillas.
This fear of Black men, in that sense,
has existed since the birth of America.
So, yeah, it's not hard
to imagine that Carolyn Bryant
felt that she was somehow under attack,
that even a slight gesture
would appear to be
something way out of order.
When I go in the store, right away
you're in Mississippi and the
store is ran by white people.
Got to bring out your Southern training.
"Yes, sir," and "no, ma'am." Be careful.
It's a way of life. You learn this.
I didn't have to be thinking.
I didn't have to rehearse it.
-I know where I'm at.
-[bell jingles]
So Emmett comes in,
Bobo comes in the store.
It just hit me all at once.
I said, "Man, I hope he got it right."
I didn't know if his mother,
if she had taught him
what to say and how to do
and how to behave.
I left him in there.
Nothing happened while we was in there.
And Simmy went in. Nothing happened.
Got what they want, came out.
They came out, and some time later,
I don't know how long it was,
Ms. Bryant came out.
She came out, and Emmett
loved to make people laugh.
He gives this wolf-whistle.
I mean, we all could have fainted.
In Mississippi in 1955?
And you give a wolf-whistle?
What is wrong with you?
People will kill for a reckless eyeball.
He have no idea where he's at,
no idea what he has done.
And no one said, "Let's go."
We just made a beeline for the car.
Now he's afraid
because he sees our reaction.
Man, we shot out of there,
going down this gravel road,
dust is flying,
and there's a car behind us.
And the car come out of nowhere.
I mean, we out in the country.
Where'd this car come from?
Said, "Man, they after us."
We left the car, and we ran
through the cotton field,
and I remember Bobo falling,
and we ran over,
and the cotton balls,
they beating your legs.
And of course, the car went
on by, and then we regrouped
at the edge of the road.
Ruth, she said,
"Look, I know those people."
Said, "Y'all are gonna hear
some more from this.
This is not over."
And Emmett, he asked to stop
to tell my grandfather.
Of course, we didn't tell my grandfather.
Thursday passed, and Friday,
then we forgot all about it.
And Sunday morning,
that's when it all jumped off.
♪
♪
Sunday morning, about 2:30
in the morning, I woke up.
I heard them talking,
and they talking about
what happened at the store.
It's dark as a thousand midnights.
And you could hear them coming.
They said, "You got two boys
here from Chicago,"
and I said, "Oh, my God.
I'm getting ready "
I said, "These people
getting ready to kill us."
I said, "We're getting ready to die."
[train whistle blows]
♪
♪
[Moses] Sunday morning about 2:30,
I heard a voice at the door.
And I asked, who was it?
And they said, "This is Mr. Bryant.
I want to talk with you and the boy."
And when I open the door,
there was a man standing
with a pistol in one hand and
a flashlight in the other one.
[Wheeler] And they entered
my room with a flashlight.
Saw the flashlight shines, and I could see
the big bald-headed guy with the pistol.
And I'm waiting to be shot,
and I close my eyes.
And I wasn't shot.
I opened my eyes,
and they're passing by me
because they were looking for fat boy,
the fat boy from Chicago.
[Thelma] They went to the next room
and found Simeon and Emmett,
and they told him to get up.
And he got up, and he was
putting on his shoes,
and they said, "Hurry up."
And he said, "I'm not used
to putting on my shoes
without my socks."
[Wheeler] Bryant was not the leader.
His half-brother,
J.W. Milam, is in control.
He was running it, taking care
of his little brother,
and showing him how
he's supposed to be expert
in handling people that got out of line.
He said he did it in the military.
My grandfather tried
to tell them, "Don't take him.
The boy didn't have good sense,"
or something of that nature,
and my grandmother offered them money.
And they marched him to the car,
and he drove toward Money.
♪
[thunder rumbles]
[Wheeler] And that's
the last time we saw him.
[Marvel] He said, "I think about
the look in Emmett's eye
when they took him out of that house
and nobody said a word."
He said, "I wonder what he was thinking."
And that's a burden that he carries.
At times, I've wondered, "Why
didn't they put up a fight?"
But they couldn't.
What could they have done?
I think about the young woman
who recorded George Floyd's death.
[Floyd] I can't breathe, Officer.
Get off of his neck!
[Woman] You don't have to
kneel on him! He's dying!
[Angie] And the death threats she's gotten
just from standing there with a phone.
So when I think of Emmett and
his family, it's the same thing.
In that moment, if they had not complied,
they could have all been killed.
[Wheeler] I stayed
right there in that room.
Only person that was awake
beside me was Simeon.
He never left his room.
No one said anything after.
It was just quiet
as a church mouse, so to speak.
♪
[telephone ringing]
[Benson] Early on Sunday morning,
Mamie's awakened by the call
from Willie Mae, a cousin.
The call that no mother ever wants to get.
Emmett has been taken
in the middle of the night
by two white men.
She goes into a panic and begins
to process what can be done.
She knows what that means,
when white men come for you
at 2:00 in the morning in Mississippi.
It's not good.
[Thelma] I was in church
when they stopped the service
and told us that two white men
had taken Bo.
And I cried.
I cried, and I cried.
I couldn't stop crying.
This is a transformative moment for Mamie.
She has to take charge,
and she rises to the occasion.
♪
[Michaeli] Mamie Till-Mobley
contacts The Defender
and the Chicago Tribune right away
and gets the Chicago media
involved in a way
-that will make this a national issue.
-She also was able to make contact
with the nephew of her
stepfather, Rayfield Mooty,
who was a union official
with Inland Steel,
the steelworkers union,
and was well-connected
in the Chicago community.
He began to outline the things
that they needed to do.
They needed to call on elected officials
in order to make a difference
in the search for Emmett
down in Mississippi.
Unlike today, politics was a
thing everybody was engaged in.
Chicago was a political animal.
It was a force.
Your alderman represented
your neighborhood
that represented you in the City Council.
So you knew who your alderman was.
And that was one of my first
direct experiences with politics
because my father was a precinct captain,
and that meant that he worked
in a ward for an alderman.
[Michaeli] And so Mamie would
have grown up in a community
where she knew
who the precinct captain was.
[Benson] So the political
officials at the time
also became activated, and even
Mayor Daley got involved.
♪
As the hours ticked on,
there was uncertainty in Chicago
with what was being done down
in Mississippi to find Emmett.
And understanding the
racial politics of Mississippi,
everyone feared the worst.
♪
[insects chirping]
[Wheeler] When they took Emmett,
it was very terrifying.
They told my grandfather they
were gonna bring him back
if he wasn't the one.
So I didn't sleep all night.
Every time a car went by,
"Oh, here they come."
As dark as a thousand midnights
andit seemed like daylight
would never come.
Sitting there in the dark,
I was just terrified
because my imagination, you know,
was running away with me,
and I'm planning my getaway
because I'm in Mississippi
and I got to get out of here.
Once the news got to Chicago, my mother,
some kind of way, got in touch
with my daddy's brother,
Elbert Parker.
And Uncle Elbert takes him to Duck Hill,
to Uncle William's house.
[Wheeler] My Uncle William took
me early to the train station,
and that's when I was able
to get out of there, so
Excuse me, but I always had
a lot of respect for my uncles.
In the South, they were putting
their life on the line
to get involved with something like that.
♪
[train whistle blows]
[Angie] He wasn't the first one,
and he wasn't the last one.
Black people, Black men,
and Black boys especially
were often smuggled out of Mississippi
in the middle of the night
because there was a threat on their life
and they had to get out
as soon as possible,
as quickly as possible.
Yeah, I just couldn't
get home fast enough.
♪
When I got to the train station,
they were there to pick me up,
and they took me straight
to Emmett Till's mother's house.
I felt I don't know if
the word is "guilty" or what,
but when I saw her, I'm here, I survived,
and her son didn't.
It's kind of hard to put into words.
But it had a bearing on me.
By now, from Sunday morning,
her son has been missing.
Over 24 hours, I guess, had passed,
and they knew the South.
They knew the South.
♪
♪
[Reporter] This is the muddy
backwoods Tallahatchie River,
where a weighted body was found.
♪
♪
[Pearson] Three days after
Emmett Till was missing,
his body was found by a young boy
who was fishing in the Tallahatchie River.
[Johnny] Robert Hodges,
the only thing he found
of the child Emmett in the black bayou
was the legs sticking up.
And he notified the sheriff's department,
and they came out and took the body.
[siren wails]
♪
Wednesday, the sheriff came
and told me they had found
a body at Philipp
and wanted me to go and identify
the body, which I did.
And we found the body,
which didn't have on any clothes at all.
His body was so badly damaged
that we couldn't hardly
just tell who he was.
[Pearson] Brutally beaten.
A cotton gin fan tied around his neck
with a piece of barbed wire
in the hopes to hold the body down.
It was a naked body that was
swollen and battered and beaten.
[Moses] But he happened to have
on a ring with his initials,
and that cleared it up.
His father's ring was still on his finger,
and that was the proof that Papa offered
in identifying him as being Emmett.
♪
♪
[telephone rings]
[Angie] Then the call came
Emmett's body had been found.
Aunt Mamie started crying and yelling,
and we didn't know what had happened.
The grief in the house,
the sadness in the house
was horrible.
♪
The screaming.
The disbelief.
[Thelma] Mamie was just devastated.
It was hard to see her heartbroken.
♪
[Gordon] But she had
to pull herself together
'cause she had to get
the mechanisms in place
to bring him back to Chicago.
♪
♪
[Benson] Now, the Tallahatchie
County Sheriff, H.C. Strider,
orders that Emmett's body
be buried immediately,
before the sun sets that day.
The grave is actually being dug
when Mamie gets the information
that they're about to bury
her son in Mississippi.
First of all, why is the sheriff
even making that decision?
When have you heard of a sheriff
deciding that the body should be buried?
There's something really, really
that they're trying to hide here.
For his mom, that was
an immediate red flag.
She set off a domino effect.
Miss Mamie began to call
everybody she knew.
She called the governor.
She called Mayor Daley.
She called everybody she could touch
and finally got them engaged
to bring the child home.
♪
The stopping of the burial
came from Illinois.
Chicago Mayor Daley,
who had just become a mayor,
they stepped up and got that stopped.
♪
[Benson] The same train that
took Emmett down,
the City of New Orleans train,
brought his remains back to Chicago.
♪
♪
The night they brought Emmett's
body back from Mississippi,
everybody went down to the train station.
♪
♪
[Gordon] The body came in, I understand,
in a wooden sealed box.
♪
[Dyson] Her uncle and authorities
had signed an agreement
that the casket would be sealed.
Why would Mississippi
want a sealed casket?
Hmm.
Emmett's mother said,
"Well, give me a crowbar,
give me whatever.
What can they do to me?
They've taken my son."
[Mamie] What could they charge me
with anyway?
Breaking and entering? I didn't care.
The Mississippi officials were the ones
with something to hide.
What on earth was it?
What was I about to witness?
It's powerful, and it's
it was history-changing.
That one little act of
"I'm gonna see my son.
I'm going to see my son's face"
literally changed history as we know it.
Captions by VITAC
[choir vocalizing]
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