Live In The Sky



Emmett and His Mother



As a young child I was told the story about a young man named Emmett Till my mother mentioned him when our family was going to Mississippi for a family reunion. My mother, grandmother, and aunts warned us about wondering off and proper etiquette basically how crucial it was when we go down south. Recently over my winter break I watched the Emmitt Till documentary on TV One and I was in tears the whole time and the image of his body has not left my mind. For those who do not know about this story I will enlighten you.



Who Was Emmett Till?
Emmett Louis "Bobo" Till was born  July 25, 1941 born and raised in Chicago, Illinois.  He was the son of Louis Till he passed away in 1945, and Mamie Carthan passed away in 2003. His mother was born and raised in the small town Delta town of Webb, Mississippi. When Mamie Carthan was only two years old her family moved to Argo, Illinois at that time there was a great migration of African-Americans leaving the south.  They were trying to escape the lack of opportunity as well as corrupted law. Emmett Till was raised primarily by his mother and grandmother Mamie Carthan and his father split up sometime in 1942. His father cheated on his mother and choked her severely once. Louis Till was ordered by a judge to stay away from Mamie Carthan and either go to jail or the Army but he died in 1945. So Mamie moved on with her life  she worked and raised Emmett when he was six years old he contracted polio and the cause of his persistent stutter.
What Happened in 1955?
Emmett Till spoke to a 21 year old woman named Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store. emmtt's cousins dared him to speak to her and he said to her "Bye Baby" as she left the store. Several nights later, Bryant's husband Roy and his half-brother J. W. Milam, arrived at Till's great-uncle's house where they took Till, transported him to a barn, beat him and gouged out one of his eyes, before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River,weighting it with a 70-pound (32 kg) cotton gin fan fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was discovered and retrieved from the river three days later. The part that baffles me the most about this is a few black men were involved in horrible act of violence.



The AfterMath
As you can see the image is very disturbing it appears as though this young teenager does not even look human. The death of Emmett Till was the catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement. That same year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus in Alabama, constant media coverage of The Little Rock Nine at Cental High School in Arkansas struck a nerve with black youth in 1957,the NAACP came to the forefront, as well as activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, The Black Panther Party later in the 1960s. I can't imagine the pain and suffering his family endured nor I want to. May he rest in peace his blood was shed in order to spark a movement that changed the world.