Free Low Road by Jr. Eddie B. Allen Page B

boy outside and disappeared with him. His body, nude, brutalized, and decomposing, was later discovered by another teenager while he was fishing in the Tallahatchie River. It appeared that Emmett had been put through a hellish torture: A seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan was fastened to his neck with barbed wire, his skull was partially crushed, and an eye was missing. Hundreds of news reporters arrived at the rural courthouse where two white men were put on trial for taking a black life. The judge refused to let the store clerk give her testimony, believing that it would inflame the jury, though she had already done plenty of talking about what had occurred. Neither Bryant’s husband, nor his half-brother, took to the witness stand. None of Emmett’s young cousins who’d been at the market would testify, either. One of the boys who had accompanied Emmett to Mississippi was prevented from returning, for fear that his safety might be at stake. At sixty-four, Mose Wright, however, took perhaps the boldest step of anyone toward gaining justice for his nephew. It was an unwritten rule that black folks didn’t testify against whites in court, but the old man was asked to identify the men he had watched helplessly dragging Emmett off into the darkness of the early morning. Wright stood and pointed at the codefendants, saying “There he.” In the broken English that it was delivered, the statement was no less dramatic and should have been no less damning. But an all-white jury deliberated for just over an hour, and a juror arrogantly confided in one reporter that it had only taken this long because they stopped for a soda break. The men were found not guilty of both the murder and the more obvious charge of kidnapping. Public outcry rejecting the verdict provided momentum for what eventually became an era dedicated to challenging the existing social system. “The life of a Negro in Mississippi,” declared one foreign newspaper, “is not worth a whistle.” Mamie Till Bradley became a lecturer, referring to her son as a “little nobody who shook up the world.”
    Demonstrations had little immediate effect on justice in Mississippi. Mose Wright left the state to be with his Chicago family, while the men who killed his nephew stayed behind to brag about their crime. The pair received $4,000 from a publication in exchange for telling their story: They claimed they had abducted Emmett and brutalized him to frighten the child, which they had acknowledged during the trial. But when the boy showed he was too proud to beg for mercy or apologize, they said, they had little choice but to murder him. The racists said Till was shot in the head and then they threw him in the river after he was given one last chance to deny believing his humanity equaled that of a Caucasian yet refused it. J. W. Milam seemed as if his only regret in the child’s killing was that Emmett hadn’t known better, when he was quoted as saying: “What else could we do? He was hopeless. He thought he was as good as any white man. I’m no bully. I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers—in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.”
    Marie found that in Alabama, where she also performed, there was a different type of notice being given. Months after the Till case, the city’s capital of Montgomery found itself crippled significantly. In December 1955, 42,000 Negro residents began a year-long boycott of the public transportation system. Ordinance called for black passengers to sit in the rear, gradually decreasing their allotted space as more white passengers boarded. The previous year, on May 17, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate-but-unequal facilities in education were unconstitutional. Five different cases that had challenged the legality of segregation in schools had originated in South Carolina, Virginia, Kansas,