Yeah.
And it's just to keep his limp from being seen,
though everybody knew he had a limp.
And he had a st- st- stutter.
And so, of course, he gets to Mississippi.
He's the only child.
And he would have what would be considered money,
as he's down there, maybe probably
gave him $5, which, if you consider that his cousins got
up at dawn, a little bit before, went out into the fields,
and picked cotton all morning until it
got too hot to be out there, and all they got was a quarter.
Emmett was in good shape.
So Emmett is bragging.
And he's having a good time.
He said, he's just a regular kid.
And he's having a good time.
They're teasing him about his stutter
and they're laughing at him.
And so Emmett is saying things like, I--
I-- I no fight people.
And they're laughing.
They say, you don't.
He's I-- and he said I--
have-- a white girlfriend.
And so, they were teasing.
They said, well, there's a girl in that store.
Go in there and say something to her.
Now her name is going to be Carolyn Bryant.
And Carolyn is going to say Emmett grabbed her.
But I grew up in segregation.
Anybody in this aud-- my age knows
that there's no way that could have happened.
When you, as a Black person, go into the store,
the first thing you do, is you go in,
and you tell them what you want.
Me, I was into windmill cookies.
So I'd say, like, two cents worth of windmill cookies.
Not that stuff they do now, but when they really
did ginger and butter, right?
And then you have to put your money-- you tell them
what you want, and you put your money on the counter, right?
Emmett-- in this case, we know he was buying bubblegum--
so he's saying, what, a nickel's worth of bubblegum.
And he puts a quarter there, whatever he had.
Nothing's going to happen until he takes
his hand off that counter.
We've got a whole counter in between.
Carolyn Bryant, the clerk, wherever--
is going to then pick up that money,
generally make the change first, and then get you what you want.
And she's going to put that there.
And then she's going to withdraw.
And she's going to actually step back a little bit.
And then you're going to take it.
So there's never any flesh touching that.
We know that when it got to the--
get ready to walk out the door, that he said something
like, bye, baby, or, see you, you
know, something smart that it didn't amount to diddly, right?
And they went on.
Everybody was laughing.
Well, her husband, Roy Bryant, and his half brother,
who are both crazy, had been down
in Louisiana, hauling shrimp.
They came back a day later.
And we do know that it was somebody Black who
said to them, what are you going to do about that boy that
talked smart to your wife?
And so now we have a situation.
2 o'clock in the morning, they're
knocking on Moses Wright, who was Emmett's great uncle--
because he's Mamie's uncle, Emmett's great uncle.
They're knocking on the door, 2 o'clock in the morning.
And I'm sure I'll have to tell anybody in this room, when
somebody knocks on your door at 2 o'clock in the morning,
they mean you no good.
They don't want to talk to you.
They don't want to have an explain--
they want to kill you.
And you have to be a fool not to know that.
Moses knew, immediately, when he heard the knock,
that something was wrong.
He kept--
[SINGLE DRUM BEAT]
--trying to buy time.
And finally, JW, who we know to be a crazy man, and JW said,
Marlon said to him, you know, either you-- either we
get the boy, or we're going to kill everybody.
And I'm sure he knew that.
And so Emmett had to go.
And this is going to be very sad.
I'm sure it played on Moses' heart,
because Mamie had sent him down thinking he would be safe.
Now we know-- and the reason that the case remains open--
is we know that they took him from the house to the truck.
And they said to somebody in the truck, is this the boy?
And somebody said, yes.
The presumption was that it was Carolyn Bryant,
but that we don't know.
It could have been any number of people.
But nonetheless, we know somebody else did that.
They took Emmett to JW's barn and they beat him.
They literally beat him all night.
They beat him.
They said his cries could be heard all over the Delta.
They beat him to the point that he was unrecognizable.
One eye was missing.
One eye was hanging by a thread.
They had-- it looked like that they had taken an ax
and split his head in two.
We know that there was a hole in his head, that was first
assumed to be a bullet hole, but upon examination,
we realized some kind of drill was done.
We know that he was castrated.
It was a terrible thing.
We know that when that frenzy stopped--
because it was a frenzy--
that even JW and Roy knew this should not be seen.
This-- we have gone beyond anything
that's going to make sense.
So they sent a man named Too Tight Jones out
to get a gin fan, weighed 50 pounds.
He got it.
And they took barbed wire, and they wrapped it around Emmett--
wrapped around his neck-- and they wrapped it
around the gin fan.
They dropped it in the Tallahatchie,
with the presumption being that it wouldn't come up.
And if there's one thing, for those
of us who would be Christian, there's
one thing we know about Jesus.
He said, I have to die, but I don't have to stay dead.
And so three days later, he comes back up.
We have Emmett's body coming up, which
nobody thought that body was going to ever come back up.
By then, of course, Emmett's mother is in Mississippi.
So the Sheriff was saying to her,
as they discovered the body, you know, what are you doing here?
She says, it's my son.
He said, how do we know it's your son?
Well, first of all, he had a ring.
But not first of all, he had a ring on his finger--
on his baby finger-- said LT, which
stood for his dad, Louis Till.
But she didn't need that.
Any mother in this room-- you don't need anything
to tell you your son.
She knew that was her son.
Sheriff said, we don't even know if he's Black.
But of course, the Sheriff was not only a fool, but a liar.
He knew he was Black.
And we know that because she sent him
to Century funeral home, which was the Black funeral home.
If there had been any idea that that was a white body,
would have never gone over there.
Now the greatest man, I think, in America,
that are unheralded, are the Pullman porters.
And it was the Pullman porters-- they are great men.
And if ever you're looking for something to study,
the Pullman porters are the people we should study.
But the Pullman porters went to Mrs.--
she's Mrs. Bradley, at this point.
And they said, how can we help?
She said, I want him at home.
Century Funeral Home, for those of you is in Greenville.
For those of you down in Mississippi, you know that.
And it's about 1,000 yards from the railroad tracks.
When the northbound train came, in the Pullman
porters stopped the train, and they got the body,
and they put it on.
Now, of course, he's been in the water for three days.
He's waterlogged and he's badly beaten.
So you know that it was not a pleasant thing to have around.
It smelled.
But they didn't put him in baggage,
because they knew if they put that body--
that casket-- in baggage, all of them
would get killed, because Mississippi
was determined that this would be
a crime that nobody would see.
They wanted to bury it there in Mississippi.
So they put it in their personal effects and they watched over.
And they got him to Chicago, where,
until the March on Washington, the biggest civil rights
demonstration in America was the viewing
of the body of Emmett Till.
His mother did a good thing.
She opened that casket.
And that had to be extremely difficult.
But she opened the casket, and she said the words,
I want the world to see what they did to my son.
And I think everybody on Earth should be proud of Mamie.
But the Sheriff said, she ought to be ashamed of herself.
Sheriff was a fool.
Sheriff said, she ought to be ashamed of showing this body.
But it wasn't Mamie's shame.
That's like, you know, your husband's beating you,
and he's telling you ought to be ashamed to let
your girlfriends see you.
It's not your shame.
He's the fool beating you.
You need to give it back to him.
Somebody in this room has been raped.
It's not your shame that some fool raped you.
You have to give it back to the people, right?
Why do you carry the shame for somebody else's actions?
And Mamie Till refused to carry the shame.
And she made-- she put the shame where it belonged,
on the state of Mississippi, United States of America.
And the world saw that.
And the world reacted.
And Rosa Parks is going to react in a very good way.
We have a death in the end of August.
We have a trial in September.
We have them found not guilty.
The defense summed up the trial by saying,
I know every Anglo-Saxon drop of blood in your body
will let you free these men.
And they did, not guilty.
But, of course, now we have something
called double jeopardy.
And so they can't be tried again.
They sell their story to William Bradford Huie at Look Magazine.
And it's in there.
Yes, we killed him and this is why.
This is the end of September.
Now we've got 31 days in October,
we've got 30 days in November, we have the 1st of December.
62 days from that action, Rosa Parks
is going to be sitting on the bus.